Photomatons

Documentary about the history of experimental cinema in Spain. FRAGMENTS is a historical survey of “the other” Spanish Cinema — films that brazenly explored their artistic, poetic and conceptual potential. Spanish experimental cinema can be glimpsed in a series of important yet isolated events that FRAGMENTS compiles through various firsthand accounts, film excerpts and documents. For the first time in Spain, a documentary brings together the most relevant of a cinema that is slowly losing its invisibility.

The film uses, almost exclusively, unfinished materials by the Granada-born filmmaker José Val del Omar (1904-1982). This is a free approach to the missing link with which Val del Omar intended to culminate his work, made up of what he described as abstract documentaries, cinematographies or elementals. The elemental is a resoundingly poetic declension of the documentary. After the elementals of water (Granada), fire (Castile) and earth (Galicia) that make up his Elemental Triptych of Spain, Val del Omar intended to add a fourth film as the vertex and vortex of his entire oeuvre. New images of Granada - the counterpoint of the Arabic-Andalusian culture that Val del Omar felt in his veins with the hurried gaze of the tourist hordes (wandering between the closed paradise of the Alhambra and the open gardens of the Generalife) - give way to the dynamic ecstasy, progressively abstract and full of images, of a time without a clock, without space, without feet or ground?