Burning with love. The Super 8s of Val del Omar

In the 1970s, Val del Omar started to film frequently in Super 8. These reels, in the form of essays and notebooks, include the fabulous experiences with image and light that he investigated in his PLAT laboratory, and a series of private recordings (trips, holidays, portraits), that also include variations and experiments on his main themes (water, flowers, the Alhambra…). Transfiguring his most everyday reality, Val del Omar continued the revelations of its mecamystics: “The extraordinary is in the bowels of the everyday […] I feel as though I am submerged in a palpitating being. Logical chains enchain and imprison us.” A selection of these images, rarely before shown in public, can now be seen through the “collective eye” which, for Val del Omar, is the cinema.

Variaciones sobre una granada, c. 1975, 35 mm, 3 min; Experiencias PLAT, c. 1975/1982, Super 8mm, 46 min (editing by Gonzalo de Lucas and Marta Verheyen). Video screening.

Credits: images loaned by Archivo Val del Omar, Madrid (president-founder: Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga; direction: Piluca Baquero Val del Omar; coordination: Santiago García de Leániz).