Jose Val del Omar

José Val del Omar - Mannequins

Técnica: Super 8

Biografía del Artista:

Includes the photograph "PLAT Laboratory". Photographic print on cotton paper. 50 x 50 cm. José Val del Omar is the most renowned experimental filmmaker in Spain and one of the European leaders in audiovisual innovation. In 1974, Amos Vogel, director of the New York Film Festival, described him as one of the greatest artists yet to be discovered in the international cinema scene. Val del Omar stands out as a unique figure in the history of experimental cinema. This is due not only to his technical innovations, but also to the evolution that is clearly evident in his four-decade career. His career began in the 1920s with his poem-films connected to Dadaism and Surrealism, followed by expanded cinema in the 1950s and continued in the 1960s and 1970s with underground films. In the following years, he came up with a number of extraordinary inventions as a result of his PLAT (Pictural Audio Tactile Light) research laboratory. Bionic cyclo-tactile optics, Tactilvision, Panoramic Image Overflow, and Diaphonic Sound are some of them. The Laboratory is part of the permanent collection of the Reina Sofía Museum. The “cinemista” (filmmaker + alchemist) Val del Omar managed to fuse aesthetics and technology in his work, creating visual and experimental poems. His work reaches dimensions never before explored, not only in poetic content, but also in the sensorial range in which we experience his films. In this sense, we can draw a parallel line between Val del Omar and the artist-inventors of the Renaissance. Val del Omar for more than 30 years advocated and promoted the use of the 8 mm film format that he called substandard cinema. He was a pioneer in photographic miniaturisation and in 1930 he made his first microfilm and then organised the first public screening of this film at the Tivoli cinema on 23 March 1935. Although it was Kodak that would manage to standardise its super 8mm film format – an improved version of its 8mm tape – presented for the first time at the Uniatec congress in Milan in 1964, Val del Omar had already developed an 8.75mm tape 20 years earlier. France, without success, would try to propose it as a standard at the congress. It was precisely the latter that was used for the more than 50 documentaries of Misiones Pedagógicas. Val del Omar's main interest was in promoting the implementation of this film format for television as a technological development that would allow for a much simpler and more democratic relationship between the public and cinema. Proof of this were the many actions he carried out, such as his participation in the Fotokina exhibition in Cologne in 1963, the Vía Libre España operation for the 1964 New York World's Fair, or the Barcelona Film Congress in 1965.