| On the background and the guts of the project |
Throw Your Watch to the Water is a creative work constructed on the basis of several unfinished projects by the Granada filmmaker José Val del Omar. These projects date from 1968 until 1982, the year of Val del Omar’s death, and he referred to them in his notebooks in a manner somewhere between concise and oblique, and also with different titles and premises.
The director of the film, Eugeni Bonet, met Val del Omar in 1980, had a hand in his rediscovery by the public as one of the pioneers of experimental and documentary cinema in Spain, and has subsequently worked devotedly on this free interpretation and recombination of the material that Val del Omar put together over fifteen years as a work in constant progress.
Val del Omar never intended to make a full-length film with the elements used in this work, which in no way claims to be the reconstruction of any concrete and properly delineated project, since the Granada-born filmmaker always rejected the straitjacket of detailed storylines and scripts. This being so, the subtitle of the film describes its nature fairly precisely, as a series of ''Variations on an Intuited Cinegraphy by José Val del Omar''.
When he came to explore Val del Omar's intentions by way of the notes and images he left behind, Eugeni Bonet intuited a way of giving new life to the images, techniques and abandoned projects of a great artist who produced only a small body of work. At the same time he avoided the impossible role of medium, recalling Dziga Vertov's generative precept about films that stimulate and generate other films; that said, the ideas of the Russian filmmaker present numerous affinities with those of Val del Omar.
The film, Bonet notes, is a kind of remix of a work that never had a first mix. The soundtrack, with the electro-acoustic music of the FMOL Trio – some of it composed and scored, some largely improvised – further reinforces this conception. Nevertheless, a number of sequences and elements are very close to the original material.
This is true, for example, of the ''whirlwind of ecstasy'' that breaks out near the middle of the film and goes on for more than twenty vertiginous minutes, containing several grafts of and various variations on the picto-luminic experiences of the late and always surprising Val del Omar, taking as a source some Super-8 footage that provided documental testimony to those experiences.
This same section culminates with the three-minute piece entitled Variaciones sobre una Granada [Variations on a Pomegranate], with hardly any retouching of the original: rough material straight from the camera but with an identity of its own in its incorporation of all a whole parade of techniques (tactilevision, picto-luminic, laser, stop motion, etc).
The section with the ''snap-happy tourists'', on the other hand, has a tight montage, increasingly abrupt and jocular, that was already intuitively present in the way Val del Omar had assembled those images. In this case, the soundtrack includes a recording made by Val del Omar himself, which features some snatches of grotesquely accelerated Flamenco singing, and the at times cacophonic jondo rhythms of Flamenco dancer Vicente Escudero (almost certainly extra takes supplementing the ones Val del Omar used in his Fuego en Castilla [Fire in Castile]).
Bonet also notes that the late viewing of the workprint entitled Ojala (late because of the precarious condition in which the footage was found) enabled him to rescue a number of images he had at first discarded because he could see no way of fitting them in. Thus, it is no mere whim of Bonet's that the Flamenco dancers turn in moving forward and back – in a kind of proto-scratch – or that images are inverted ''without feet or ground'' – and not only in their spatial co-ordinates, but also in time: these details faithfully reproduce the jolts intuited by Val del Omar. (One of his notes reveals that he even thought of issuing the audience with special overshoes that would transmit electric shocks at certain moments.)
All in all, it is clear that Throw Your Watch to the Water does not appear to be a film ''by'' Val del Omar; unscreened, posthumous, patiently reconstructed from indicative elements over the course of more than two years work. Only these last two data are entirely certain, and in fact Eugeni Bonet is actually amused at the idea of the confusions, discussions and digressions that might arise in relation to the authorship of such a peculiar film, which he prefers to think of as a work that belongs to no one.
When, after several delays in the completion of his Tríptico Elemental and other interspersed projects, Val del Omar conceived the idea of a fourth elementary as a final rounding-off of the trilogy, we have to assume that he also intuited the film as a testament. And, as if this bearing this out, the film culminates in the finality of death – albeit a death devoid of any funereal, tragic sense: at most it is melancholy – and implicitly contains within it a new ''without end'', like the films he completed himself.
Mara Villas
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