Val Del Omar

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SHC 7 (2) pp. 101–115 © Intellect Ltd 20

Studies in Hispanic Cinemas

Volume 7 Number 2

© Intellect Ltd 2010. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/shci.7.2.101_1

MATT LOSADASan Diego State University

San Juan de la Cruz inTactilvisión: Thetechnological mysticism of

José Val del Omar’s Tríptico elemental de España

KEYWORDS

José Val del OmarSpanish experimentaTríptico elemental de EsSan Juan de la Cruz

Aguaespejo granadino Fuego en Castilla

ABSTRACT

In José Val del Omar’s Tríptico elemental de España [Elementary Triptych of Spain] , the Andalusian film-maker and inventor employs the cinematic apparatusas a mystical medium. The first two parts of this experimental synthesis of Spanishmysticism and avant-garde film-making were screened at major European film festi-vals in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after which they disappeared from view. Thisessay examines how the Tríptico creatively appropriates the writings of the Spanishmystic poet San Juan de la Cruz to produce a cinematic analogy in which elementsof mystical thought correspond to Val del Omar’s experimental cinematic practices:man’s attachment to the material world and the resulting blindness to the divine aretranscended by way of ‘purgation’, leading to a condition receptive to the encounter with the divine, and, finally, to the union with the divine in nature.

The first two parts of José Val del Omar’s Tríptico elemental de España/ElementaryTriptych of Spain were screened at major film festivals in the late 1950s and


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early 1960s, before they passed into a near-total oblivion.1 Amos Vogel saw 1 The films receivedawards at Cannes(the TechnicalGrand Prize),Bilbao andMelbournefestivals, and thenbecame

unavailable. Sincethe 1980s they have occasionally been screenedtheatrically,opening a 1982retrospective of Spanishexperimental filmat the Centre

Pompidou andscreening at the1989 inaugurationof the Filmoteca de

Andalucía , which

has sincerecovered andrestored severaldocumentariesmade by Val delOmar. A DVDedition recently released in Spainincludes theTríptico and severalof these.

Aguaespejo granadino/Water-Mirror of Granada in one of its first showings, andlater commented:

An explosive, cruel work of the deepest passion, a silent cry, this is a

mystic evocation of the nightmares of Spain. Reminiscent of Buñuel’sLand Without Bread , it succeeds in conveying nameless terror and anxi-ety. One of the great unknown works of world cinema, surfacing at theFirst International Experimental Film Festival of Brussels, it just as quickly disappeared and is now unavailable.

(Vogel 1974: 64)2

2 Vogel founded the New York Film Festival andthe Cinema 16 filmsociety, and wrote the

1974 classic Film as aSubversive Art , in which this passageappears.

Aguaespejo granadino is the first of the two short films of the Tríptico that the Andalusian film-maker and inventor completed in his lifetime. Vogel’s descrip-tion of the film might recall the work of Goya, but it would be more accurate

to see resonances of mystic poetry in the nightmarish mysticism of ‘name-less terror and anxiety’, specifically the sufferings of ‘purgation’ described inSan Juan de la Cruz’s 1580s commentary on his poem En una noche oscura/TheDark Night. In what follows I will examine Val del Omar’s appropriation of thestages of San Juan’s mystic journey to construct corresponding moments inthe audience’s experience of the Tríptico. My reading is not meant to confinethe multiplicity of Val del Omar’s film to a single reading, but to propose ananalogy between the two texts that reconciles the traditional visionary – themystic poet – with the avant-garde visionary, the film-maker who proposes touse the technology of the cinema as a mystical medium with which to shockthe spectator out of an anaesthetized modern condition. The sixteenth-century

Spanish mystic poet’s reformist orientation and his programme of seeking anindividual and unmediated communion with the divine were considered dan-gerous heresy by his Carmelite Order, and he was put in prison, where he

wrote his most important poetry.3 He also wrote four commentaries on his3 Carlos Saura’s 1989 film

Noche oscura/The Dark Night narrates San Juan’s imprisonment.The stages of San

Juan’s spiritual journey are alsorepresented in Saura’sfilm, but in ways

vastly different fromthose of the Tríptico.

own poems in which he described the stages of a mystic journey, starting from a fallen condition, advancing through purgation, to arrive at the ‘illu-minative’ or ‘unitive’ stage.4 Although Val del Omar does not refer to the

4 Val del Omar, also a writer, mentions San Juan in his poems Acuarium lumínico , Noche de San Juan and Idea clave , and in his1971 essay Clavemístico a unabioelectrónica española.

All can found, inSpanish only, in theonline Val del Omararchive:http://www.valdelomar.com/texto1.php?lang =es&menu_act=7

Tríptico as an adaptation of San Juan’s work, each of these stages is clearly represented.

Val del Omar first came to the cinema in the intellectual ferment of theavant-garde, whose project his work carries on, but, as Román Gubern writes,the cinema of the historical avant-garde was short-lived in Spain:

Los superiores costos del nuevo cine parlante, la mayor complejidad y la especialización técnica que se derivaron de él, la crisis económicagalopante y la radicalización política que propició en las elites artísticasla adopción del realismo didacticista pregonado por el poder soviético,se conjugaron para decapitar el modelo experimental y transgresor quesuponía la razón de ser de aquellas vanguardias.

[The higher costs of the new sound cinema, the greater complexity andthe technical specialization that arose from it, the galloping economiccrisis and political radicalization that led the artistic elites to adopt the


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San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisión: The technological mysticism of José Val del .

didactic realism extolled by Soviet power, combined to decapitate theexperimental and transgressive model that was the reason for being of those vanguardias.]

(Gubern 1995: 1)5

5 All translations are mineunless otherwiseindicated.

When Francoism’s cultural marginality was added to the difficulties describedby Gubern, Val del Omar’s project would find little room in the Spanish culturalfield of the 1940s and 1950s. The film-maker turned to experimentation withlenses, sound, lighting and projection technology, developing the elements of the ‘audiovisual neoperception’ he would later employ in the Tríptico.6 These

6 The term audiovisualneoperception is usedin an essay by Gubernon Val del Omar’stechnologicalinnovations. See alsothe ‘technical

writings’ section of the ‘official’ Val delOmar website:http://www.valdelomacom/texto1.php?lang =&menu_act=7&text1_

inventions are described by Val del Omar himself in his essays, but GonzaloSáenz de Buruaga provides the most comprehensive account, dividing theminto two categories, those of a commercial-industrial design and those intendedspecifically for use in Val del Omar’s own film projects. I will only discuss thelatter here.

Like most Spanish experimental film-makers, Val del Omar’s marginaliza-tion has been nearly total, converting his work into an underground myth, aholy grail for narrative cinema’s Iberian discontents. His Tríptico is a grand-child of the phantasmagoria, the nineteenth-century light and shadow showsintended to produce illusions of the supernatural, a relationship made evidentby the production and projection techniques Val del Omar invented for his ownfilms: Sonido diafónico [Diaphonic Sound], Desbordamiento apanorámico de laimagen [Apanoramic Overflow of the Image], Visión táctil (or Tactilvisión ) [Tac-tile Vision] and other techniques meant to immerse the viewer in the cinemaexperience, to which I will return.

Val del Omar’s project also has points in common with Dziga Vertov’s ‘kinoeye’, in the sense that both view the cinema as a tool to expand on the percep-tual possibilities of the human body, but instead of the rhythms of machines

and other modern technology, the Tríptico privileges those of nature. Aided by audiovisual technology – freeze frames, fast and slow motion, and the effectsmade possible by Val del Omar’s inventions – water, clouds and light dance inrhythms not normally visible to the eye. These experiences, only possible in thedarkened room of the cinema, range from the idyllic to the nightmarish andfrom torment to mystic illumination.

The explosiveness described by Vogel comes from Val del Omar’s updating of the tradition of Spanish mysticism with the power of a futuristic techno-logical apparatus, intended to release his cinema from confinement within theedges of the flat screen, in a move from the optic towards the haptic – theengagement with the sense of touch – and an intensely immersive cinema

that expands the perceptive possibilities beyond those normally available tothe corporeal sensorium.

VAL DELOMAR, INVENTOR

Val del Omar, born in Granada in 1904, was friend of many prominent avant-garde figures of his native city, among them Federico García Lorca and Manuelde Falla (the composer of El amor brujo/Love the Magician and Noches en los jar-dines de España/Nights in the Gardens of Spain ). Like many other Spanish artistsof his generation, his first exposure to the avant-garde was in Paris, while onan extended stay in 1921. Back in Spain, he began to experiment with light-ing techniques and lenses – inventing an early version of the zoom – before


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joining the Spanish Republic’s Misiones Pedagógicas , or educational missions –the government-sponsored programme that brought modern culture and artsto rural communities – as official photographer and documentarian.7

7 See Mendelson, pp.93–116, for anextensive account of

Val del Omar’s work with the Misiones Pedagógicas.

While working with the Misiones Pedagógicas he filmed more than 40 doc-umentaries, several of which still exist. Much of the surviving footage andphotographs show the faces of the rural spectators reacting to the novelty of the cinema, an attention to the hypnotic power of the medium that will laterbe addressed in Val del Omar’s inventions and in the project of the Tríptico.

Immediately after the Civil War, Val del Omar was recruited by the Francoistregime to build loudspeaker systems for propaganda diffusion. This collabo-ration in a totalitarian exploitation of technological power, one that left thelistener little freedom to negotiate the meaning of the sounds being imposedon him or her, was later addressed by Val del Omar in several of his essaysdealing with an ethics of the audiovisual. He wrote of this collaboration:

Quien en 1930 había soñado una cinta del ‘sentido místico de la energía’,su instinto de conservación propia, el hambre de los suyos y (por qué no

confesarlo también) la vanagloria de sobresalir , sin tener conciencia de latrascendencia del daño, puso en marcha una polución sonora infernal que,cuanto más tiempo pasa más lo llena de pesadumbre, al sentirme unode los fundadores de la cretinización colectiva ; quemando para el diablola sensibilidad virginal de criaturas tan divinamente predispuestas por eldestino a convertir en eucarísticos todos los actos de su vida.

[He who had in 1930 dreamed of a tape with the ‘mystical sense of energy’, his self-preservation instinct, the hunger of his family and (why not also confess) the vain boastfulness of wanting to stand out , withoutbeing conscious of the significance of the damage, set in motion an infer-

nal resonant pollution that, with the passing of time fills him with sorrow at the feeling that I am one of the founders of collective cretinization ; burn-ing to hell the virginal sensitivity of creatures so divinely predisposed by destiny to convert into eucharistic all of the acts of their lives.]

(El camino de la deformación , no date, original emphasis)

The move from the third to the first person distances the present Val del Omarfrom the past, demonstrating not only a concern about commercial and pro-pagandistic uses of the apparatus to which he devoted much of his life, butalso a consideration for the sensitivity of the premodern corporeal sensoriumto the ‘divine’. But although he is fully conscious of the danger inherent in

audiovisual technology, he does not condemn it outright, recognizing insteadits beneficial possibilities when used with a ‘verdadero amor al prójimo’ [‘truelove for one’s fellow man’] (Val del Omar 1959: 2). While his own films, more

Wagnerian than Brechtian, do not shy away from the cinema’s power to seduce,they could not be mistaken for Francoist or fascist, in part due to their inclusiveredefinition of Spanish identity. They work against the conventional historian,as described by Michel de Certeau, who ‘has received from society an exorcist’stask. He is asked to eliminate the danger of the other ’ (quoted in Giard 2000:18). Instead of the linear history favoured by traditionalist historians, in whichSpain’s origins are defined through the exclusion of various ‘others’, Val delOmar recognizes these marginalized Iberian presences in his films by integrat-ing Jewish, Moorish, Christian and Celtic symbols into a unity perceivable, intheory, to a restored mystic consciousness.


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Later, in the 1940s, he was employed as the chief of special effects at theEstudios Chamartín (one of the four major film studios in post-War Spain),edited radio programmes, and filed several patents for his work in audio tech-nology, including the Diáfono system, which places sound sources both infront of and behind the cinema spectator, each on a separate track, in orderto produce what he calls a ‘dialectical dialogue’ of sound. Sáenz de Buruagadescribes diaphonic sound in this way: ‘Se trata de un sonido de “choque” entreespectador y espectáculo, producido por altavoces situados rigurosamente acontracampo en pantalla y fondo de sala’ [‘It is a sound of “collision” betweenspectator and spectacle, produced by speakers rigorously situated in opposi-tion, behind the screen and at the back of the theater’] (Sáenz de Buruaga and

Val del Omar 1992: 215). This immersive sound system was Val del Omar’s firsttechnological step towards the total spectacle of the Tríptico.

When Aguaespejo granadino played at the 1956 Berlin Film Festival, Val delOmar himself supervised the showing, since the regular projectionists wereunfamiliar with the workings of the Diáfono technology and that of a newerinvention, the Desbordamiento apanorámico de la imagen. Sáenz de Buruaga

quotes Val del Omar himself in his description of the effects of the latter:

el efecto producido por un doble juego de imágenes: ‘la imagen nítidacentral foveal aparece en la zona de la pantalla actual, y la segundaimagen concéntrica y cuatro veces mayor en área, aparece como anilloextrafoveal o marco inductor hacia la primera. Este anillo sirve de puente

y sus imágenes han de ser imágenes abstractas’.

[the effect produced by a double set of images: ‘the sharp central fovealimage appears in the zone of the current screen, and the second image,concentric and four times larger in area, appears as an extrafoveal ring or

inductor frame for the first. This ring serves as a bridge and its imagesmust be abstract’.]

(Sáenz de Buruaga and Val del Omar 1992: 215).

The spectator is engulfed by the concave screen that results from the simul-taneous projection of abstract images, synchronized with the rhythms of thefilm’s sound, on the front and side walls and the ceiling of the theatre.

In the meantime, Val del Omar continued work on other inventions, somecommercializable, such as the VDO Bi-standard 35 – a technique that allowedfor a double use of film stock, designed to economize on materials while using

existing projection technology – and others less so, like Visión táctil – a systemof pulsating light intended to augment haptic perception. He describes Visióntáctil as ‘una iluminación destinada a provocar, por arco reflejo, sensaciones detacto y de posesión de los objetos iluminados, creando así un mayor despeguede planos, materias, sustancias, temperaturas y tiempos’ [‘a lighting destined toprovoke, by arc reflex, sensations of touch and of possession of the illuminatedobjects, creating a greater “launch” of shots, matters, substances, temperaturesand times’] (quoted in Sáenz de Buruaga and Val del Omar 1992: 215). Val delOmar integrated Visión táctil into the filming of the second part of the Tríptico , Fuego en Castilla/Fire in Castile , in 1957.

The third part of the Tríptico , Acariño galaico/Galician Caress , he filmed in1961, but had not completed its editing by the time he died in 1982. 8 The films

8 A version of Acariño galaico was edited inaccordance with Valdel Omar’s notebooksusing his originalfootage and sound, in1995 by JavierCodesal, for the

Filmoteca de Andalucía

as they can be seen today lack the Desbordamiento apanorámico , but the Sonido


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diafónico is reproducible with the proper sound system, and the Visión táctil ,used to film many of the shots of Fuego en Castilla , can be experienced.

THE TRíPTICO : A CINE-MYSTIC JOURNEY THROUGH THENOCHE

OSCURAThe settings of the Tríptico elemental de España – Granada, Castile, Galicia –arc across the Iberian Peninsula, while the corresponding elements – water,fire, earth – point to a premodern epistemology and the deep time in whichSpanish identity turns inclusive, taking on a complexity that traditionalists andthe Franco regime had long tried to eliminate from the history of the nation. Aguaespejo granadino and Fuego en Castilla themselves are very dissimilar works,in both theme and form (as well as technological apparatus). I will examinespecific aspects of each on its own, after briefly discussing the workings of theTríptico as a whole. Since Acariño galaico was left unfinished, I will not discussit in detail.

Val del Omar stated that the Tríptico was to be viewed in reverse order toits making, starting with Acariño galaico , then Fuego en Castilla , and finishing

with Aguaespejo granadino. This sets up a sequence that follows San Juan’s mys-tic journey from a postlapsarian condition in which the spirit is trapped by thebody’s attachment to the material in Acariño galaico , through Fuego en Castilla’sconfrontation with the sufferings of the noche oscura of purgation – or ‘derelic-tion’, the pain of being abandoned by God, as seen in Job or in Jesus’s cry fromthe cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ – that prepares the

viewer for Aguaespejo granadino’s mystical union, the encounter with the divinein nature. In his writings, Val del Omar, a devoted reader of San Juan, linkedhis grand project, which he called Mecamística (Mecha-mysticism), to the poet.

Like the mystic tradition, the Tríptico is intended to condition the viewerfor the encounter with the divine. It does so primarily through two formalstrategies, first, the intensification of what Vivian Sobchack calls the ‘pri-mary engagement’ of the viewer, and second, the use of defamiliarizationto represent the perception of the ineffable. In her 2004 phenomenologicalinquiry on cinema-going, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Cul-ture , Sobchack addresses the film viewer’s ‘primary engagement [ . . . ] withthe sense and sensibility of materiality itself’ (2004: 65), as opposed to narra-tive cinema’s privileged ‘secondary engagement with and recognition of either“subject positions” or characters’ (2004: 65). Primary engagement refers not tothe viewer’s identification with characters’ sensory experiences, but to his or

her direct experience of the visual and aural stimuli of the film: ‘We, ourselves,are subjective matter: our lived bodies sensually relate to “things” that “matter”on the screen and find them sensible in a primary, prepersonal, and global way’(Sobchack 2004: 65). Val del Omar’s emphasis on this direct sensorial impact isevidenced by his technological inventions, and was obviously not lost on Amos

Vogel.Sobchack refers to the film viewer produced by the melding of primary

and secondary engagement as the ‘cinesthetic subject’, the workings of whichshe describes in the first person: ‘Experiencing a movie, not ever merely “see-ing” it, my lived body enacts this reversibility in perception and subverts the

very notion of onscreen and offscreen as mutually exclusive sites or subject posi-tions’ (Sobchack 2004: 66–67). Sobchack’s formulation of the cinesthetic subjectserves to move beyond the limited way that perceptual possibilities are usually


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addressed in accounts of the cinema viewer – in terms of identification withsubject positions of characters within the diegesis – as implied by one of thesources of Sobchack’s neologism ‘cinesthetic’. Coenaesthesia refers to a condi-tion analogous to that fostered by both San Juan’s mysticism and Val del Omar’scinema: ‘Neither pathological nor rare, coenaesthesia names the potential andperception of one’s whole sensorial being. Thus, the term is used to describe thegeneral and open sensual condition of the child at birth’ (Sobchack 2004: 68).Coenaesthesia, thought of as an ideal pre-cultural state of sensory receptivity,

would be analogous to what in San Juan’s mystic project is the privileged con-dition for the encounter with the divine, as he describes in The Ascent of MountCarmel: ‘The soul is like a tabula rasa when God infuses it into the body, so thatit would be ignorant without the knowledge it receives through the senses’(Sobchack 2004: 76). Sobchack conceives of cinematic experience as groundedin a similar openness to the richness and complexity of bodily experience, anaspect not lost on Val del Omar.

His work – both films and inventions – could be seen as a grand lifelong project that strives towards a coenaesthetic ideal. This is evident in two key

strategies employed in the Tríptico. First, he foregrounds primary engagementby seldom offering the spectator the opportunity for secondary identification.

Although very place-specific, the construction of space functions to resist spec-tatorial expectations of illusionism, by cutting off the possibility of coherent andrecognizable diegetic space into which a spectator could settle. In nuts and boltsterms, it does this by avoiding the basic practices of classical continuity cinema –establishing shots, continuity matches across cuts, observation of the ‘axis of action’ or the ‘180 degree rule’, carrying the sound across the cut between dif-ferent shots that depict the same space – and its ‘camera ubiquity’, the termused by Noël Burch (1986) to describe the classical cinema practice of consis-tently relocating the camera to offer the viewer a privileged view of the action.

In addition, Val del Omar often avoids perspectival representation within theindividual shots by lighting the object in front of the camera, usually a statue,

while leaving the background completely black, or employing distorting filtersand movement of the profilmic reality of the statues. To use an analogy fromSan Juan, this creates a ‘dark night’ in which the viewer is isolated from thefilmic universe.

This construction of space is seen in the opening sequence of the processionin Fuego en Castilla: the sound is cut simultaneously with the image, and the axisof action is not respected, causing the procession to move first from right to leftacross the screen, then from left to right, switching direction several times. Thisprovides no unified position into which an observer/spectator could comfort-

ably settle, continuously fracturing the narrative drive that would normally con-dition the spectator’s expectations and the accompanying physical responses.This denial of a secondary subject position, the virtual body in a virtual space

with which the spectator of classical cinema would identify, obligates the spec-tator to engage more directly with the materiality of the film’s light and sound.

The other way Val del Omar attempts to recreate a cinematic version of the coenaesthetic ideal happens at the moments of illumination, the ‘mysti-cal union’ that appears in the Tríptico at the end of Fuego en Castilla and atseveral specific moments in Aguaespejo granadino. As in San Juan’s poetry, themetaphor of water is employed to represent the ineffable ubiquity and vitality of the divine, but the moments of union are marked by distortions of colour,lighting or movement. In what follows I will examine further how the two filmsparallel San Juan’s mystic journey, first the purgation in Fuego en Castilla , andthen the mystic encounter with the divine in Aguaespejo granadino.


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A HAPTICPURGATION

La muerte es solo una palabra que se queda atrás cuando se ama. El queama, arde, y el que arde vuela a la velocidad de la luz, porque amar es serlo que se ama.


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[Death is only a word, left behind when one loves. He who loves, burns,and he who burns flies at the speed of light, because to love is to be whatone loves.]

– Fuego en Castilla

The above verses, referencing the mystical ecstasy of one who overcomes thelove of earthly things and is thus able to love the divine, are heard accompa-nying the images of flowers and blue sky – in distorted and dramatic colour,following the black-and-white film – that close Fuego en Castilla. They follow apowerful representation of purgation, consisting of images of religious statuesin movement, lit by Tactilvisión and accompanied by unidentifiable but violentsounds.

In San Juan’s The Dark Night of the Soul purgation is represented by themetaphor of night, during which the subject suffers due to ‘his natural, moral,and spiritual weakness’ (337). This weakness results in a human attachment tothe material, which must be overcome through the sufferings of a purgationthat ‘puts the devil to flight, for he has power over a man attached to tempo-ral and bodily things’ ( Ascent of Mount Carmel: 75). As might be expected, themortification of worldly appetites is the cause of intense suffering:

Since this divine contemplation assails him somewhat forcibly in orderto subdue and strengthen his soul, he suffers so much in his weaknessthat he almost dies, particularly at times when the light is more powerful.Both the sense and the spirit, as though under an immense and dark load,undergo such agony and pain that the soul would consider death a relief.

(The Dark Night of the Soul , 337)

The weakness to be overcome, the appetites that must be mortified by this suf-fering, are referred to in an earlier sequence, a quasi-comic montage showing members of the bourgeoisie busily engaged in the kind of material distrac-tions, such as travel, shopping and nightlife, that would prevent them frombeing receptive to the divine. Then comes the purgation section, and the movetowards the primary engagement of the viewer.

In the sequence of the statues’ torment there are no human characters andno coherent space, only carved images of saints; thus, identification is inhib-ited and the viewer forced into ‘primary engagement’ with the light, shadow and sound of the projection, augmented by the rebounding Sonido diafónico

and the engulfing Desbordamiento apanorámico. The statues are lit against ablack background by bands of pulsating light and shadow, as horizontal, thenconcentric patterns crawl across the surface relief of the carved faces. This tech-nique, impossible to fully describe, is Visión táctil , intended to ‘expresar pormedio de la luz, la sensación táctil que esos sujetos producen cuando (se) lostoca’ [‘express by way of light, the tactile sensation that those subjects pro-duce when touched’] (Val del Omar 1955: 3). Instead of the purely optical, Valdel Omar’s intent is to mimic a sort of radar: ‘Los ciegos, los murciélagos y elradar “palpan” acudiendo a sistemas tactiles pulsatorios para suplir a la óptica.Mandan una señal y reciben la reflexión de ésta en forma de eco’ [‘The blind,bats and radar “touch”, resorting to tactile pulsatory systems to supplement theoptical. They send a signal and receive the reflection in the form of an echo’](Val del Omar 1955: 2).


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Val del Omar’s description presages Giuliana Bruno’s linking of the cinemato the haptic, which she defines in the following manner:

As the Greek etymology tells us, haptic means “able to come into contact with.” As a function of the skin, then, the haptic – the sense of touch –constitutes the reciprocal contact between us and the environment, bothhousing and extending communicative interface.

(Val del Omar 2002: 6)

The surface of the image disappears, and instead of becoming a window ontoreality the cinema becomes a space of immersion into a collective religiousmemory whose fire may have faded somewhat during the journey into moder-nity, but whose coals are raked by the Tríptico. The memory of the suffering of religious martyrs will be shared by the viewer who has attended mass, readsaints’ lives and otherwise been cultured as a Spanish Catholic.

In the purgation sequence the sound is not necessarily diegetic, but issynchronized to the images. The individual sounds are technologically manip-ulated, distorted beyond recognition, so when set against the images they sparka multitude of possible signifieds for the viewer who attempts to make sense of the vertical (sound–image) montage. Combined with the Tactilvisión-lit imagesof statues of suffering saints, the sounds – banging, tapping, swishing, creak-ing – evoke, for those who resort to the repository of collective religiousmemories to make sense of this puzzle, the many torments of martyrs, becom-ing the crunching of bones, the cracking of whips, the crackling of fire and thebreaking of bodies on the rack.

THE ENCOUNTERWITHTHE DIVINE

Suddenly the purgation is complete. In a beautiful, oddly coloured sequencethe camera leisurely tracks through a field of flowers seen against the blue


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background of the sky, and the song of birds is heard, vaguely distorted. Theimages and sounds evoke the verses of the Song of Songs that are repeatedas a metaphor for the moment of mystical encounter with the divine by San

Juan in his Cántico espiritual: ‘Winter is now past, the rain is gone, and theflowers have appeared in our land’ (499), as the distortions to the colour and

sound produce a defamiliarizing effect, mimicking the sensorial acuity of thecoenaesthetic condition.


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The encounter is of the type Bernard McGinn calls ‘nature mysticism’, in which ‘God’s presence (is discerned) in, with, and through his beautiful cre-ation’ (McGinn 2006: 282). Creation, especially that of the natural world, is,then, the path to the divine, and as Rowan Williams writes, for San Juan ‘thegoal of created order is to point the soul to self-transcendence’ (Williams 1990:176). Since self-transcendence is a precondition for achieving a union with thedivine, at the moments of mystical illumination Val del Omar is faced with thedouble task of representing the ineffable divine itself, and the human perceptionof it, or the ecstatic state. To address the problem of ineffability, Val del Omaruses metaphor and defamiliarization, and to represent the perception of thedivine, secondary identification.

From San Juan, Val del Omar appropriates a metaphor. Near the end of Aguaespejo granadino the following phrases are heard over an image of the poolsat the Alhambra:

Aquí la tenéis suspensa[ . . . ]estancada[ . . . ]prisionera en el camarín desu cultura. ¡Aguaespejo de la vida, subir, subir, y subir[. . .]hasta caer, caer,

retornar! ¡Pero qué ciegas son las criaturas que se apoyan en el suelo!¡Dios! ¡Dios! ¡Amar! ¡Qué ciegas, estando tú tan abierto!

[Here you have it suspended[ . . . ]stagnant[ . . . ]prisoner in the cell of its culture. Water-mirror of life, rise, rise, and rise[ . . . ]and fall, fall,return! But how blind are the creatures that lie on the ground! God! God!To love! How blind, and you being so open!]

In this passage, heard spoken at the end of Aguaespejo granadino , the stagnantprisoner that culture has tamed is water, one of the metaphors, along with‘love’ and ‘God’, for the divine in the Tríptico. San Juan’s preferred metaphor

was also water, as in the well-known verses ‘Qué bien sé yo la fonte que mane y corre/aunque es de noche’ [‘For I know well the spring that flows and runs,although it is night’] (John of the Cross 1979:723). San Juan and Val del Omarboth use this metaphor to represent the ineffable, but on film water itself is

visible even to a ‘fallen’ perception, although not in its divine aspect. Corre-sponding to Williams’ description of the unitive state as casting ‘a new light onthings[ . . . ]a fresh sense of the world as God’s world’ (Williams 1990: 188) –the acuity of coenaesthetic perception – Val del Omar utilizes techniques of defamiliarization to represent this ‘new light’ and ‘fresh sense’ cast on creation.In Aguaespejo granadino he manipulates image velocity, uses freeze frames, fil-ters and uses other techniques to make water dance in ways imperceptible to

the naked eye, and portrays it rising and falling in the various stages of thehydrologic cycle, as condensation, steam, fog, clouds and flowing water.But in San Juan’s model, defamiliarization of the object must correspond

to a perceiving subject. As the above passage is heard, images are seen of a young girl’s face as she marvels at the vision of a forested hillside with cloudsfloating above. She is Ana Zaida, seen early in the film exiting a cave, thengazing skyward as the voice-over intones ‘Granada es la eterna frontera de lanoche a la mañana, el lugar del encuentro de la piedra con el agua, la tierraflorecida en Ana Zaida’ [‘Granada is the eternal frontier between night andmorning. The place of encounter between stone and water, the earth in flowerin Ana Zaida’]. Being a flower of the earth, Ana Zaida is in unity with creation,thus receptive to the divine in the natural world, and the exemplary subject of the illuminative experience. As in Fuego en Castilla’s closing shot of the flowers,


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her perceptive acuity is marked cinematically by distortion, in this case by theaccelerated movement of the clouds. But added here is the reaction shot of her face expressing a coenaesthetic perceptual receptivity. Ana Zaida, and her

wonder at the divine in the nature, is made available for the spectator to identify with. This secondary identification, in combination with the viewer’s primary

engagement with a defamiliarized, and thus visibly divine, nature, completesthe circle of the Tríptico’s ‘cine-mystic’ illumination.


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Matt Losada

In conclusion, Val del Omar’s preoccupation – one at the same time mod-ern and traditional – with the loss of a prelapsarian sensorial receptivity wasmanifested in his work with the Misiones Pedagógicas – the images of enrap-tured villagers seeing moving pictures for the first time – and persisted throughhis post-Civil War concern for the ‘sensibilidad virginal’ of his fellows, hisnumerous inventions and, finally, the films of the Tríptico. Val del Omar’s devel-opment of a technological means to transform the cinema into a mysticalmedium to which he could adapt the mystic journey of San Juan represents anabsolutely unique example of filmic experimentation, both within Spain andelsewhere. Although the film did not find a viewership in the limited Spanishcultural field of its time, its recent reappearance in filmic and digital formats hasfilled in a lacuna in film history and is currently providing inspiration for new experimental film-making.9

9 See, for example, therecent experimentalfilms included in theDVD set mentionedabove.

REFERENCES

Bonet, E. (2000), Amar:Arder-Candentes cenizas de José Val del Omar ,http://www.valdelomar.com/sem1.php?lang =en&menu_act=8&sem1_codi=5&sem2_codi=9. Accessed 30 December 2010.

Bruno, G. (2002), Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film , New York: Verso.

Burch, N. (1986), ‘Primitivism and the avant-gardes’, in P. Rosen (ed.), Narra-tive, Apparatus, Ideology , New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 483–506.

Giard, L. (2000), ‘Introduction: Michel de Certeau on Historiography’, inG. Ward (ed.), The Certeau Reader , London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 17–22.

Gubern, R. (1995), La neopercepción en Val del Omar , http://www.valdelomar.com/sem1.php?lang =es&menu_act=8&sem1_codi=8&sem2_codi=11. Accessed

29 October 2009. John of the Cross, Saint (1979), The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross , (trans.

K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez), Washington, DC: ICS Publications.McGinn, B. (ed.) (2006), ‘Introduction’, The Essential Writings of Christian

Mysticism , New York: The Modern Library.Mendelson, J. (2005), Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the

Modern Nation, 1929–1939 , University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.Russo, E. A. (2000), Conjeturas sobre José Val del Omar: el que ama, arde ,

http://www.valdelomar.com/sem1.php?lang =en&menu_act=8&sem1_codi=10&sem2_codi=13. Accessed 30 December 2010.

Sáenz de Buruaga, G. and Val del Omar, M. J. (1992), Val del Omar: Sin fin ,

Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada and Filmoteca de Andalucía.Sobchack, V. (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture ,Berkeley: University of California Press.

Val del Omar, J. (1953–1961), Tríptico elemental de España , in Val del Omar:Elemental de España (DVD edn., 2010), Barcelona: Cameo Media.

——— (1955), Teoría de la Visión Tactil , http://www.valdelomar.com/texto1.php?lang =es&menu_act=7&text1_codi=1. Accessed 29 October 2009.

——— (1959), Fines perseguidos por la técnica diafónica VDO , http://www. valdelomar.com/texto1.php?lang =es&menu_act=7&text1_codi=1&text2_codi=7. Accessed 29 October 2009.

——— (n.d.), El camino de la deformación , http://www.valdelomar.com/texto1.php?lang =es&menu_act=7&text1_codi=6&text2_codi=30. Accessed 29October 2009.


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Vogel, A. (1974), Film as a Subversive Art , London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson. Williams, R. (1990), The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New

Testament to Saint John of the Cross , Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publishing.

SUGGESTEDCITATION

Losada, M. (2010), ‘San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisión: The technological mys-ticism of José Val del Omar’s Tríptico elemental de España’, Studies in HispanicCinemas 7: 2, pp. 101–115 , doi: 10.1386/shci.7.2.101_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Matt Losada received his doctorate from the University of California, Berke-ley. He lectures at San Diego State University on Spanish and Latin Americanliterature.

E-mail: [email protected]


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Val Del Omar

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