SHC 7 (2) pp.

101115 Intellect Ltd 2010

Studies in Hispanic Cinemas

Volume 7 Number 2
Intellect Ltd 2010. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/shci.7.2.101_1

MATT LOSADA
San Diego State University

San Juan de la Cruz in

Tactilvisin: The
technological mysticism of
Jos Val del Omars Trptico
elemental de Espaa
ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

In Jos Val del Omars Trptico elemental de Espaa [Elementary Triptych of

Spain], the Andalusian film-maker and inventor employs the cinematic apparatus
as a mystical medium. The first two parts of this experimental synthesis of Spanish
mysticism and avant-garde film-making were screened at major European film festivals in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after which they disappeared from view. This
essay examines how the Trptico creatively appropriates the writings of the Spanish
mystic poet San Juan de la Cruz to produce a cinematic analogy in which elements
of mystical thought correspond to Val del Omars experimental cinematic practices:
mans attachment to the material world and the resulting blindness to the divine are
transcended 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.

Jos Val del Omar

Spanish experimental film
Trptico elemental de Espaa
San Juan de la Cruz
Aguaespejo granadino
Fuego en Castilla

The first two parts of Jos Val del Omars Trptico elemental de Espaa/Elementary
Triptych of Spain were screened at major film festivals in the late 1950s and

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Matt Losada

The films received

awards at Cannes
(the Technical
Grand Prize),
Bilbao and
Melbourne
festivals, and then
became
unavailable. Since
the 1980s they
have occasionally
been screened
theatrically,
opening a 1982
retrospective of
Spanish
experimental film
at the Centre
Pompidou and
screening at the
1989 inauguration
of the Filmoteca de
Andaluca, which
has since
recovered and
restored several
documentaries
made by Val del
Omar. A DVD
edition recently
released in Spain
includes the
Trptico and several
of these.
Vogel founded the New
York Film Festival and
the Cinema 16 film
society, and wrote the
1974 classic Film as a
Subversive Art, in
which this passage
appears.

early 1960s, before they passed into a near-total oblivion.1 Amos Vogel saw
Aguaespejo granadino/Water-Mirror of Granada in one of its first showings, and
later commented:
An explosive, cruel work of the deepest passion, a silent cry, this is a
mystic evocation of the nightmares of Spain. Reminiscent of Buuels
Land Without Bread, it succeeds in conveying nameless terror and anxiety. One of the great unknown works of world cinema, surfacing at the
First International Experimental Film Festival of Brussels, it just as quickly
disappeared and is now unavailable.
(Vogel 1974: 64)2

Aguaespejo granadino is the first of the two short films of the Trptico that the
Andalusian film-maker and inventor completed in his lifetime. Vogels description 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 nameless terror and anxiety, specifically the sufferings of purgation described in
San Juan de la Cruzs 1580s commentary on his poem En una noche oscura/The
Dark Night. In what follows I will examine Val del Omars appropriation of the
stages of San Juans mystic journey to construct corresponding moments in
the audiences experience of the Trptico. My reading is not meant to confine
the multiplicity of Val del Omars film to a single reading, but to propose an
analogy between the two texts that reconciles the traditional visionary the
mystic poet with the avant-garde visionary, the film-maker who proposes to
use the technology of the cinema as a mystical medium with which to shock
the spectator out of an anaesthetized modern condition. The sixteenth-century
Spanish mystic poets reformist orientation and his programme of seeking an
individual and unmediated communion with the divine were considered dangerous 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 his
own poems in which he described the stages of a mystic journey, starting
from a fallen condition, advancing through purgation, to arrive at the illuminative or unitive stage.4 Although Val del Omar does not refer to the
Trptico as an adaptation of San Juans work, each of these stages is clearly
represented.
Val del Omar first came to the cinema in the intellectual ferment of the
avant-garde, whose project his work carries on, but, as Romn Gubern writes,
the cinema of the historical avant-garde was short-lived in Spain:

Carlos Sauras 1989 film

Noche oscura/The Dark
Night narrates San
Juans imprisonment.
The stages of San
Juans spiritual
journey are also
represented in Sauras
film, but in ways
vastly different from
those of the Trptico.

Val del Omar, also a

writer, mentions San
Juan in his poems
Acuarium lumnico,
Noche de San Juan and
Idea clave, and in his
1971 essay Clave
mstico a una
bioelectrnica espaola.
All can found, in
Spanish only, in the
online Val del Omar
archive:
http://www.valdelomar.com/
texto1.php?lang=es
&menu_act=7

102

Los superiores costos del nuevo cine parlante, la mayor complejidad

y la especializacin tcnica que se derivaron de l, la crisis econmica
galopante y la radicalizacin poltica que propici en las elites artsticas
la adopcin del realismo didacticista pregonado por el poder sovitico,
se conjugaron para decapitar el modelo experimental y transgresor que
supona la razn de ser de aquellas vanguardias.
[The higher costs of the new sound cinema, the greater complexity and
the technical specialization that arose from it, the galloping economic
crisis and political radicalization that led the artistic elites to adopt the

San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisin: The technological mysticism of Jos Val del . . .

didactic realism extolled by Soviet power, combined to decapitate the

experimental and transgressive model that was the reason for being of
those vanguardias.]
(Gubern 1995: 1)5
When Francoisms cultural marginality was added to the difficulties described
by Gubern, Val del Omars project would find little room in the Spanish cultural
field of the 1940s and 1950s. The film-maker turned to experimentation with
lenses, sound, lighting and projection technology, developing the elements of
the audiovisual neoperception he would later employ in the Trptico.6 These
inventions are described by Val del Omar himself in his essays, but Gonzalo
Senz de Buruaga provides the most comprehensive account, dividing them
into two categories, those of a commercial-industrial design and those intended
specifically for use in Val del Omars own film projects. I will only discuss the
latter here.
Like most Spanish experimental film-makers, Val del Omars marginalization has been nearly total, converting his work into an underground myth, a
holy grail for narrative cinemas Iberian discontents. His Trptico is a grandchild of the phantasmagoria, the nineteenth-century light and shadow shows
intended to produce illusions of the supernatural, a relationship made evident
by the production and projection techniques Val del Omar invented for his own
films: Sonido diafnico [Diaphonic Sound], Desbordamiento apanormico de la
imagen [Apanoramic Overflow of the Image], Visin tctil (or Tactilvisin) [Tactile Vision] and other techniques meant to immerse the viewer in the cinema
experience, to which I will return.
Val del Omars project also has points in common with Dziga Vertovs kino
eye, in the sense that both view the cinema as a tool to expand on the perceptual possibilities of the human body, but instead of the rhythms of machines
and other modern technology, the Trptico privileges those of nature. Aided by
audiovisual technology freeze frames, fast and slow motion, and the effects
made possible by Val del Omars inventions water, clouds and light dance in
rhythms not normally visible to the eye. These experiences, only possible in the
darkened room of the cinema, range from the idyllic to the nightmarish and
from torment to mystic illumination.
The explosiveness described by Vogel comes from Val del Omars updating
of the tradition of Spanish mysticism with the power of a futuristic technological apparatus, intended to release his cinema from confinement within the
edges of the flat screen, in a move from the optic towards the haptic the
engagement with the sense of touch and an intensely immersive cinema
that expands the perceptive possibilities beyond those normally available to
the corporeal sensorium.

All translations are mine

unless otherwise
indicated.

The term audiovisual

neoperception is used
in an essay by Gubern
on Val del Omars
technological
innovations. See also
the technical
writings section of
the official Val del
Omar website:
http://www.valdelomar.
com/texto1.php?lang=es
&menu_act=7&text1_codi=1

VAL DEL OMAR, INVENTOR

Val del Omar, born in Granada in 1904, was friend of many prominent avantgarde figures of his native city, among them Federico Garca Lorca and Manuel
de Falla (the composer of El amor brujo/Love the Magician and Noches en los jardines de Espaa/Nights in the Gardens of Spain). Like many other Spanish artists
of his generation, his first exposure to the avant-garde was in Paris, while on
an extended stay in 1921. Back in Spain, he began to experiment with lighting techniques and lenses inventing an early version of the zoom before

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Matt Losada

See Mendelson, pp.

93116, for an
extensive account of
Val del Omars work
with the Misiones
Pedaggicas.

joining the Spanish Republics Misiones Pedaggicas, or educational missions

the government-sponsored programme that brought modern culture and arts
to rural communities as official photographer and documentarian.7
While working with the Misiones Pedaggicas he filmed more than 40 documentaries, several of which still exist. Much of the surviving footage and
photographs 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 later
be addressed in Val del Omars inventions and in the project of the Trptico.
Immediately after the Civil War, Val del Omar was recruited by the Francoist
regime to build loudspeaker systems for propaganda diffusion. This collaboration in a totalitarian exploitation of technological power, one that left the
listener little freedom to negotiate the meaning of the sounds being imposed
on him or her, was later addressed by Val del Omar in several of his essays
dealing with an ethics of the audiovisual. He wrote of this collaboration:
Quien en 1930 haba soado una cinta del sentido mstico de la energa,
su instinto de conservacin propia, el hambre de los suyos y (por qu no
confesarlo tambin) la vanagloria de sobresalir, sin tener conciencia de la
trascendencia del dao, puso en marcha una polucin sonora infernal que,
cuanto ms tiempo pasa ms lo llena de pesadumbre, al sentirme uno
de los fundadores de la cretinizacin colectiva; quemando para el diablo
la sensibilidad virginal de criaturas tan divinamente predispuestas por el
destino a convertir en eucarsticos 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, without
being conscious of the significance of the damage, set in motion an infernal 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; burning 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 deformacin, no date, original emphasis)
The move from the third to the first person distances the present Val del Omar
from the past, demonstrating not only a concern about commercial and propagandistic uses of the apparatus to which he devoted much of his life, but
also a consideration for the sensitivity of the premodern corporeal sensorium
to the divine. But although he is fully conscious of the danger inherent in
audiovisual technology, he does not condemn it outright, recognizing instead
its beneficial possibilities when used with a verdadero amor al prjimo [true
love for ones fellow man] (Val del Omar 1959: 2). While his own films, more
Wagnerian than Brechtian, do not shy away from the cinemas power to seduce,
they could not be mistaken for Francoist or fascist, in part due to their inclusive
redefinition of Spanish identity. They work against the conventional historian,
as described by Michel de Certeau, who has received from society an exorcists
task. 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 which
Spains origins are defined through the exclusion of various others, Val del
Omar recognizes these marginalized Iberian presences in his films by integrating Jewish, Moorish, Christian and Celtic symbols into a unity perceivable, in
theory, to a restored mystic consciousness.

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San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisin: The technological mysticism of Jos Val del . . .

Later, in the 1940s, he was employed as the chief of special effects at the
Estudios Chamartn (one of the four major film studios in post-War Spain),
edited radio programmes, and filed several patents for his work in audio technology, including the Difono system, which places sound sources both in
front of and behind the cinema spectator, each on a separate track, in order
to produce what he calls a dialectical dialogue of sound. Senz de Buruaga
describes diaphonic sound in this way: Se trata de un sonido de choque entre
espectador y espectculo, producido por altavoces situados rigurosamente a
contracampo en pantalla y fondo de sala [It is a sound of collision between
spectator and spectacle, produced by speakers rigorously situated in opposition, behind the screen and at the back of the theater] (Senz de Buruaga and
Val del Omar 1992: 215). This immersive sound system was Val del Omars first
technological step towards the total spectacle of the Trptico.
When Aguaespejo granadino played at the 1956 Berlin Film Festival, Val del
Omar himself supervised the showing, since the regular projectionists were
unfamiliar with the workings of the Difono technology and that of a newer
invention, the Desbordamiento apanormico de la imagen. Senz de Buruaga
quotes Val del Omar himself in his description of the effects of the latter:

A version of Acario
galaico was edited in
accordance with Val
del Omars notebooks,
using his original
footage and sound, in
1995 by Javier
Codesal, for the
Filmoteca de Andaluca.

el efecto producido por un doble juego de imgenes: la imagen ntida

central foveal aparece en la zona de la pantalla actual, y la segunda
imagen concntrica y cuatro veces mayor en rea, aparece como anillo
extrafoveal o marco inductor hacia la primera. Este anillo sirve de puente
y sus imgenes han de ser imgenes abstractas.
[the effect produced by a double set of images: the sharp central foveal
image 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 images
must be abstract.]
(Senz de Buruaga and Val del Omar 1992: 215).
The spectator is engulfed by the concave screen that results from the simultaneous projection of abstract images, synchronized with the rhythms of the
films sound, on the front and side walls and the ceiling of the theatre.
In the meantime, Val del Omar continued work on other inventions, some
commercializable, such as the VDO Bi-standard 35 a technique that allowed
for a double use of film stock, designed to economize on materials while using
existing projection technology and others less so, like Visin tctil a system
of pulsating light intended to augment haptic perception. He describes Visin
tctil as una iluminacin destinada a provocar, por arco reflejo, sensaciones de
tacto y de posesin de los objetos iluminados, creando as un mayor despegue
de planos, materias, sustancias, temperaturas y tiempos [a lighting destined to
provoke, by arc reflex, sensations of touch and of possession of the illuminated
objects, creating a greater launch of shots, matters, substances, temperatures
and times] (quoted in Senz de Buruaga and Val del Omar 1992: 215). Val del
Omar integrated Visin tctil into the filming of the second part of the Trptico,
Fuego en Castilla/Fire in Castile, in 1957.
The third part of the Trptico, Acario galaico/Galician Caress, he filmed in
1961, but had not completed its editing by the time he died in 1982.8 The films
as they can be seen today lack the Desbordamiento apanormico, but the Sonido

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Matt Losada

diafnico is reproducible with the proper sound system, and the Visin tctil,
used to film many of the shots of Fuego en Castilla, can be experienced.

THE TRPTICO : A CINE-MYSTIC JOURNEY THROUGH THE NOCHE

OSCURA
The settings of the Trptico elemental de Espaa 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 which
Spanish identity turns inclusive, taking on a complexity that traditionalists and
the 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 examine
specific aspects of each on its own, after briefly discussing the workings of the
Trptico as a whole. Since Acario galaico was left unfinished, I will not discuss
it in detail.
Val del Omar stated that the Trptico was to be viewed in reverse order to
its making, starting with Acario galaico, then Fuego en Castilla, and finishing
with Aguaespejo granadino. This sets up a sequence that follows San Juans mystic journey from a postlapsarian condition in which the spirit is trapped by the
bodys attachment to the material in Acario galaico, through Fuego en Castillas
confrontation with the sufferings of the noche oscura of purgation or dereliction, the pain of being abandoned by God, as seen in Job or in Jesuss cry from
the cross, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? that prepares the
viewer for Aguaespejo granadinos mystical union, the encounter with the divine
in nature. In his writings, Val del Omar, a devoted reader of San Juan, linked
his grand project, which he called Mecamstica (Mecha-mysticism), to the poet.
Like the mystic tradition, the Trptico is intended to condition the viewer
for the encounter with the divine. It does so primarily through two formal
strategies, first, the intensification of what Vivian Sobchack calls the primary engagement of the viewer, and second, the use of defamiliarization
to represent the perception of the ineffable. In her 2004 phenomenological
inquiry on cinema-going, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Sobchack addresses the film viewers primary engagement [ . . . ] with
the sense and sensibility of materiality itself (2004: 65), as opposed to narrative cinemas privileged secondary engagement with and recognition of either
subject positions or characters (2004: 65). Primary engagement refers not to
the viewers 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 Omars emphasis on this direct sensorial impact is
evidenced 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 which
she describes in the first person: Experiencing a movie, not ever merely seeing it, my lived body enacts this reversibility in perception and subverts the
very notion of onscreen and offscreen as mutually exclusive sites or subject positions (Sobchack 2004: 6667). Sobchacks formulation of the cinesthetic subject
serves to move beyond the limited way that perceptual possibilities are usually

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San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisin: The technological mysticism of Jos Val del . . .

addressed in accounts of the cinema viewer in terms of identification with

subject positions of characters within the diegesis as implied by one of the
sources of Sobchacks neologism cinesthetic. Coenaesthesia refers to a condition analogous to that fostered by both San Juans mysticism and Val del Omars
cinema: Neither pathological nor rare, coenaesthesia names the potential and
perception of ones whole sensorial being. Thus, the term is used to describe the
general 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 Juans mystic project is the privileged condition for the encounter with the divine, as he describes in The Ascent of Mount
Carmel: The soul is like a tabula rasa when God infuses it into the body, so that
it would be ignorant without the knowledge it receives through the senses
(Sobchack 2004: 76). Sobchack conceives of cinematic experience as grounded
in a similar openness to the richness and complexity of bodily experience, an
aspect 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 Trptico. First, he foregrounds primary engagement
by seldom offering the spectator the opportunity for secondary identification.
Although very place-specific, the construction of space functions to resist spectatorial expectations of illusionism, by cutting off the possibility of coherent and
recognizable diegetic space into which a spectator could settle. In nuts and bolts
terms, 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 different shots that depict the same space and its camera ubiquity, the term
used by Nol Burch (1986) to describe the classical cinema practice of consistently relocating the camera to offer the viewer a privileged view of the action.
In addition, Val del Omar often avoids perspectival representation within the
individual shots by lighting the object in front of the camera, usually a statue,
while leaving the background completely black, or employing distorting filters
and movement of the profilmic reality of the statues. To use an analogy from
San Juan, this creates a dark night in which the viewer is isolated from the
filmic universe.
This construction of space is seen in the opening sequence of the procession
in Fuego en Castilla: the sound is cut simultaneously with the image, and the axis
of action is not respected, causing the procession to move first from right to left
across the screen, then from left to right, switching direction several times. This
provides no unified position into which an observer/spectator could comfortably settle, continuously fracturing the narrative drive that would normally condition the spectators 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 spectator to engage more directly with the materiality of the films 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 mystical union that appears in the Trptico at the end of Fuego en Castilla and at
several specific moments in Aguaespejo granadino. As in San Juans poetry, the
metaphor 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 films
parallel San Juans mystic journey, first the purgation in Fuego en Castilla, and
then the mystic encounter with the divine in Aguaespejo granadino.
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Matt Losada

A HAPTIC PURGATION
La muerte es solo una palabra que se queda atrs cuando se ama. El que
ama, arde, y el que arde vuela a la velocidad de la luz, porque amar es ser
lo que se ama.

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San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisin: The technological mysticism of Jos Val del . . .

[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 what
one loves.]
Fuego en Castilla
The above verses, referencing the mystical ecstasy of one who overcomes the
love of earthly things and is thus able to love the divine, are heard accompanying 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 a
powerful representation of purgation, consisting of images of religious statues
in movement, lit by Tactilvisin and accompanied by unidentifiable but violent
sounds.
In San Juans The Dark Night of the Soul purgation is represented by the
metaphor of night, during which the subject suffers due to his natural, moral,
and spiritual weakness (337). This weakness results in a human attachment to
the material, which must be overcome through the sufferings of a purgation
that puts the devil to flight, for he has power over a man attached to temporal and bodily things (Ascent of Mount Carmel: 75). As might be expected, the
mortification of worldly appetites is the cause of intense suffering:
Since this divine contemplation assails him somewhat forcibly in order
to subdue and strengthen his soul, he suffers so much in his weakness
that 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 suffering, are referred to in an earlier sequence, a quasi-comic montage showing
members of the bourgeoisie busily engaged in the kind of material distractions, such as travel, shopping and nightlife, that would prevent them from
being receptive to the divine. Then comes the purgation section, and the move
towards the primary engagement of the viewer.
In the sequence of the statues torment there are no human characters and
no coherent space, only carved images of saints; thus, identification is inhibited and the viewer forced into primary engagement with the light, shadow
and sound of the projection, augmented by the rebounding Sonido diafnico
and the engulfing Desbordamiento apanormico. The statues are lit against a
black background by bands of pulsating light and shadow, as horizontal, then
concentric patterns crawl across the surface relief of the carved faces. This technique, impossible to fully describe, is Visin tctil, intended to expresar por
medio de la luz, la sensacin tctil que esos sujetos producen cuando (se) los
toca [express by way of light, the tactile sensation that those subjects produce when touched] (Val del Omar 1955: 3). Instead of the purely optical, Val
del Omars intent is to mimic a sort of radar: Los ciegos, los murcilagos y el
radar palpan acudiendo a sistemas tactiles pulsatorios para suplir a la ptica.
Mandan una seal y reciben la reflexin de sta en forma de eco [The blind,
bats and radar touch, resorting to tactile pulsatory systems to supplement the
optical. 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 Omars description presages Giuliana Brunos linking of the cinema
to 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, both
housing and extending communicative interface.
(Val del Omar 2002: 6)
The surface of the image disappears, and instead of becoming a window onto
reality the cinema becomes a space of immersion into a collective religious
memory whose fire may have faded somewhat during the journey into modernity, but whose coals are raked by the Trptico. The memory of the suffering
of religious martyrs will be shared by the viewer who has attended mass, read
saints lives and otherwise been cultured as a Spanish Catholic.
In the purgation sequence the sound is not necessarily diegetic, but is
synchronized to the images. The individual sounds are technologically manipulated, distorted beyond recognition, so when set against the images they spark
a multitude of possible signifieds for the viewer who attempts to make sense of
the vertical (soundimage) montage. Combined with the Tactilvisin-lit images
of statues of suffering saints, the sounds banging, tapping, swishing, creaking evoke, for those who resort to the repository of collective religious
memories to make sense of this puzzle, the many torments of martyrs, becoming the crunching of bones, the cracking of whips, the crackling of fire and the
breaking of bodies on the rack.

THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE DIVINE

Suddenly the purgation is complete. In a beautiful, oddly coloured sequence
the camera leisurely tracks through a field of flowers seen against the blue
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San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisin: The technological mysticism of Jos Val del . . .

background of the sky, and the song of birds is heard, vaguely distorted. The
images and sounds evoke the verses of the Song of Songs that are repeated
as a metaphor for the moment of mystical encounter with the divine by San
Juan in his Cntico espiritual: Winter is now past, the rain is gone, and the
flowers have appeared in our land (499), as the distortions to the colour and
sound produce a defamiliarizing effect, mimicking the sensorial acuity of the
coenaesthetic condition.

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The encounter is of the type Bernard McGinn calls nature mysticism, in

which Gods presence (is discerned) in, with, and through his beautiful creation (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 the
goal 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 the
divine, at the moments of mystical illumination Val del Omar is faced with the
double task of representing the ineffable divine itself, and the human perception
of it, or the ecstatic state. To address the problem of ineffability, Val del Omar
uses metaphor and defamiliarization, and to represent the perception of the
divine, 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 pools
at the Alhambra:
Aqu la tenis suspensa[ . . . ]estancada[ . . . ]prisionera en el camarn de
su cultura. Aguaespejo de la vida, subir, subir, y subir[. . .]hasta caer, caer,
retornar! Pero qu ciegas son las criaturas que se apoyan en el suelo!
Dios! Dios! Amar! Qu ciegas, estando t 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 stagnant
prisoner that culture has tamed is water, one of the metaphors, along with
love and God, for the divine in the Trptico. San Juans preferred metaphor
was also water, as in the well-known verses Qu bien s 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 Omar
both 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. Corresponding to Williams description of the unitive state as casting a new light on
things[ . . . ]a fresh sense of the world as Gods 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, filters 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 the
hydrologic cycle, as condensation, steam, fog, clouds and flowing water.
But in San Juans model, defamiliarization of the object must correspond
to a perceiving subject. As the above passage is heard, images are seen of a
young girls face as she marvels at the vision of a forested hillside with clouds
floating above. She is Ana Zaida, seen early in the film exiting a cave, then
gazing skyward as the voice-over intones Granada es la eterna frontera de la
noche a la maana, el lugar del encuentro de la piedra con el agua, la tierra
florecida en Ana Zaida [Granada is the eternal frontier between night and
morning. The place of encounter between stone and water, the earth in flower
in 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 Castillas closing shot of the flowers,

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San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisin: The technological mysticism of Jos Val del . . .

her perceptive acuity is marked cinematically by distortion, in this case by the

accelerated 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 viewers primary
engagement with a defamiliarized, and thus visibly divine, nature, completes
the circle of the Trpticos cine-mystic illumination.

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Matt Losada

See, for example, the

recent experimental
films included in the
DVD set mentioned
above.

In conclusion, Val del Omars preoccupation one at the same time modern and traditional with the loss of a prelapsarian sensorial receptivity was
manifested in his work with the Misiones Pedaggicas the images of enraptured villagers seeing moving pictures for the first time and persisted through
his post-Civil War concern for the sensibilidad virginal of his fellows, his
numerous inventions and, finally, the films of the Trptico. Val del Omars development of a technological means to transform the cinema into a mystical
medium to which he could adapt the mystic journey of San Juan represents an
absolutely unique example of filmic experimentation, both within Spain and
elsewhere. Although the film did not find a viewership in the limited Spanish
cultural field of its time, its recent reappearance in filmic and digital formats has
filled in a lacuna in film history and is currently providing inspiration for new
experimental film-making.9

REFERENCES
Bonet, E. (2000), Amar:Arder-Candentes cenizas de Jos 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.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 483506.
Giard, L. (2000), Introduction: Michel de Certeau on Historiography, in
G. Ward (ed.), The Certeau Reader, London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1722.
Gubern, R. (1995), La neopercepcin 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, 19291939, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
Russo, E. A. (2000), Conjeturas sobre Jos 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.
Senz de Buruaga, G. and Val del Omar, M. J. (1992), Val del Omar: Sin fin,
Granada: Diputacin Provincial de Granada and Filmoteca de Andaluca.
Sobchack, V. (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Val del Omar, J. (19531961), Trptico elemental de Espaa, in Val del Omar:
Elemental de Espaa (DVD edn., 2010), Barcelona: Cameo Media.
(1955), Teora de la Visin Tactil, http://www.valdelomar.com/texto1.php?
lang=es&menu_act=7&text1_codi=1. Accessed 29 October 2009.
(1959), Fines perseguidos por la tcnica diafnica 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 deformacin, http://www.valdelomar.com/texto1.
php?lang=es&menu_act=7&text1_codi=6&text2_codi=30. Accessed 29
October 2009.

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San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisin: The technological mysticism of Jos Val del . . .

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.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Losada, M. (2010), San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisin: The technological mysticism of Jos Val del Omars Trptico elemental de Espaa, Studies in Hispanic
Cinemas 7: 2, pp. 101115 , doi: 10.1386/shci.7.2.101_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Matt Losada received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. He lectures at San Diego State University on Spanish and Latin American
literature.
E-mail: mattlosada@yahoo.com

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