A Silver Age contemporary with a projector
José Val del Omar was a contemporary and comrade of Federico García Lorca, Cernuda, Renau and Zambrano, part of the Silver Age of Spanish culture that the Civil War interrupted.[6] Cernuda called him an "extraordinary camera artist", a judgment formed through their shared commitment to the Pedagogical Missions during the Republic.[7]
The Missions were the Second Republic's most important project of cultural democratisation, and Val del Omar joined as a documentary-maker and film projectionist.[8] That detail is worth carrying into his later films. Before the 1944 diaphonic-sound patent[24] and the PLAT laboratory, his public job was to put films in front of audiences.
It shows in what came later. An artist whose first public role was running the projector went on to rethink how the screen, the sound and the room reach the viewer.
Tactile vision, PLAT and the mecha-mystic
By 1928 he had anticipated the "apanoramic overflow of the image" beyond the limits of the screen, and the concept of "tactile vision".[4] That same year, according to the Reel Suspects collection notes, he used the specialised press to publicise ideas for a variable-angle lens, concave screens and relief effects through lighting.[25] PLAT, his name for the whole programme, stood for Picto-Luminic-Audio-Tactile: a cinema addressed to more than the eyes.
In plain terms, tactile vision is pulsatory tactile lighting, which he first used in Fuego en Castilla.[26] In the Reina Sofía installation that film fills the entire space with blinking light and percussive sound.[27] Overflow is the same impulse seen from the screen's edge: his innovations strove to explode the limits of the screen.[28]
The Reina Sofía dossier lists Screen Overflow, enveloping diaphonic sound and tactile vision among ideas he made public between 1928 and 1944.[9][29] The Diaphonic System dates from 1944, an electro-acoustic system that went beyond conventional stereo,[30] and in September 1955 he prepared a typescript, The theory of tactile vision; Diaphony and reasons for its existence in television, for the UNESCO experts' meeting on film and television held in Tangier from 19 to 30 September.[31] When New York's Museum of the Moving Image mounted his installations in 2023, its press release said they anticipated what later became known as "expanded cinema".[5]
He also coined words, and they tell you how he saw himself. "Mecha-mystics", mechanics plus mystics, was his term for the universe of machines, which he approached as he approached reality, with a mystical attitude.[10] A man who talks that way is not describing gadgets. The question the rest of his career asks is what happens when a mystic gets hold of a projector.
Aguaespejo granadino: the Alhambra as water and light
Granada is where the theory touches ground. In Aguaespejo granadino, Val del Omar sets the Alhambra, its architecture and the water of its canals, fountains and gardens, to the rhythm of siguiriyas.[11]
Explore nearby · Monument
Alhambra
The Alhambra is Granada's UNESCO fortress-palace: Nasrid Palaces, Alcazaba and Generalife gardens. Tickets sell out weeks ahead; book via the Patronato site.
The canals and fountains in the frame belong to the Alhambra's water system, and anyone who has stood beside them knows the effect: the water moves slowly and talks constantly. Val del Omar's green tint and his sound are an attempt to make a viewer feel that, not merely see it.
What reads as postcard material, the arches, ponds and fountains of the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada, changes under the poem that runs through the film.[12] The same material would be a travelogue without it.
Granada was never a single visit for him. The Reina Sofía's curators trace the fluidity of his later lyrical cinegraphs back to Vibración de Granada, made in 1935.[13]
The triptych, Cannes and the order he wanted
Aguaespejo granadino (1953 to 1955) is the first panel of a triptych that continues with Fuego en Castilla (1958 to 1960) and Acariño Galaico, which was not finished until after his death.[14]
Fuego en Castilla was presented at Cannes in 1961 and received a Special Mention for its lighting,[15] a fitting prize for a man so preoccupied with light. Yet he wanted audiences to see the three films in reverse: enter through Galicia, cross Castile and leave through Granada.[16] Granada, in other words, is the last place the viewer sees.
- 1904
Born in Granada
- 1928
Tactile vision anticipated
Also the apanoramic overflow of the image.
- 1935
Vibración de Granada
An early Granada film, listed by the Reina Sofía as 1934-35.
- 1953–1955
Aguaespejo granadino
The Alhambra, its water and its gardens.
- 1961
Cannes
Fuego en Castilla wins a Special Mention for lighting.
- 1974–1982
The PLAT laboratory
His last, unfinished workshop.
- 1982
Dies in Madrid
- 2010–2011
Reina Sofía exhibition
Granada, then Madrid.
- 2023
Museum of the Moving Image
First major US gallery show of his installations.
The PLAT laboratory and a late rediscovery
Val del Omar spent his last years inside the project he never closed. El PLAT (1974 to 1982) concentrates his last works, an unfinished project in constant mutation.[17] The Reina Sofía dossier lists the gadgets from the workspace, among them his bionic cyclotactile optics, a tetraprojector adiscope for picto luminics and modified Enoscope transparency projectors.[32] He preferred a word of his own for his trade: "cinemist", meant to combine the activity of the alchemist with that of the film-maker.[18]
The world was slow to notice. His work did not begin to be rediscovered until shortly before his death, though the rediscovery has since drawn followers.[19] The Reina Sofía's 2010 exhibition was built around his sin fin, the words that close some of the few films he finished.[20]
In 2023 the Museum of the Moving Image in New York gave his immersive installations their first major gallery exhibition in the United States, running from 10 March to 1 October.[5]
Meeting Val del Omar in Granada today
Treat him as a thread through places you will visit anyway. Three starting points:
- The Alhambra and the Generalife: the water, arches and fountains of Aguaespejo granadino. Walk the channels with the film in mind.
- Centro José Guerrero: his exhibition opened in Granada here, in the Crypt of the Palacio de Carlos V, from 13 May to 4 July 2010.[21]
- Centro Federico García Lorca: screened Aguaespejo granadino on 14 May 2025 as part of a University of Granada workshop.[22]
The same exhibition then ran at the Reina Sofía's Sabatini building in Madrid from 5 October 2010 to 28 February 2011.[23]
Deep dive · Article
20 Interesting Facts About Granada, Spain
Interesting facts about Granada Spain that guidebooks skip: disputed etymologies, the soldier who saved the Alhambra, and a river buried under Plaza Nueva.
Recommended tours
Tours are selected for quality, not commission. We earn a small fee if you book — at no extra cost to you.
Those were events, not standing displays, so ask each venue what is on before you build a day around him. Then walk out to the water: the Alhambra's channels and fountains are still the best place to understand why a man who wanted cinema to be tactile pointed his camera at them.