Fire in Castile

Second part of the Tríptico Elemental, a Spanish trilogy.
With it, the director intends to move past the status of the documentary imagery. Val del Omar proposes a mythical exploration of his country, through three different regions: Andalusia, Castile and Galicia. The director draws inspiration from his country’s artistic traditions, incorporating culture and art history.

Fuego en Castilla is an essay by TactilVisión (author’s original lighting system, by impulse) on the religious sculptures of the Frenchman Juan de Juni and the Spanish Alonso de Berruguete, in a cinema that crosses from West to East, from escape to ecstasy.

Duration: 18
Production year: 1960
Country: Spain
Subtitles: Subtitles: English

José Val del Omar

Filmmaker, inventor, poet, graphic artist among others, José Val del Omar (Granada, 1904 - Madrid, 1982) is very closely linked to the medium of film as a cursed creator, an eccentric in the context of Spanish filmmaking which does not favour experimentation. Over time he has gradually become a cult figure.
Val del Omar largely devotes himself to technological explorations, both in aspects concerning cinema as well as the challenges posed in his time. The filmmaker wanted a total cinema. That is why he invented a variable-angle lens so that the camera's lens would mimic the physiological versatility of the human eye, in other words he invented the zoom before Zoomar's Germans popularised it. He wanted to integrate even smells and flavours in cinema and in this sense he is a pioneer of virtual reality.

Original title: Fuego En Castilla

José Val del Omar

Credits