TY - JOUR
AU1 - Ramos Arenas, Fernando
AB - Shortly after the proclamation of the Second Republic in April 1931, groups of cultural activists left Spain’s urban centres for its rural regions, with the aim of bringing culture to those areas’ poorest inhabitants. The participants in these ‘pedagogic missions’ organized theatrical events, recited poems, distributed books and sang songs in places that had previously been considered as locked in the cultural middle ages. They also brought cinema to people who did not even know of its existence: ‘One could write a whole book about the reaction to cinema by people who hadn’t even known the “magic lantern”’,1 wrote one of the activists. And eventually that is what these ‘missionaries’ did: they filed reports about the experience of ‘virgin’ audiences reacting for the first time to moving images;2 they filmed and photographed them; they described their astonishment, doubts and anxieties. It is this material – reports, photographs, documentaries – together with later accounts by eyewitnesses that I use as a basis for the following reflections. My analysis of these activities focuses on the reactions they caused among their audiences. The texts and images offer a way of rethinking spectatorship within a context similar to that of a ‘cinema of attractions’, usually identified with the early years of the medium. Through this line of argument I attempt to use these rich first-hand accounts to illuminate those pristine forms of spectatorship that are otherwise inferred from certain forms of representation and exhibition practices. In this I follow Yuri Tsivian, who in his analysis of early cinema in Russia proposed the figure of the ‘“innocent” viewer, that viewer with untrained cognitive habits’,3 as a historically grounded and analytically helpful instrument. This conceptualization not only works as a correction to the legends usually attached to spectatorship and early cinema (described by Tsivian as a ‘naive’ viewer), but also helps to characterize the experiences generated by the work of the missions.4 This refocusing allows me to examine the traditional connection between the cinema of attractions, pedagogy and the avant garde in an innovative way, directing attention to the particular forms of spectatorship generated by the screenings of the missions. In this regard I would like to stress the significance of the missions as a vortex where film-pedagogical initiatives connected with avant-garde screening practices. In line with Frank Kessler’s reformulation of the cinema of attractions as dispositif,5 I take into consideration the specific configurations of technology, spectatorship and texts that converge in the work of the missions, and use this approach to rethink the ‘attractions’ in this new, unorthodox (rural) environment about 30 years after its first canonical examples. Specific examples from the career of the Spanish filmmaker José Val del Omar (1904–82) will be used to illustrate my argument. Val del Omar came from avant-garde circles and worked on the graphic documentation (both with photographs and films) of the pedagogic missions.6 His explorations of film aesthetics, theory and technology, his contemporary writings on these subjects, and particularly his 1950s films Aguaespejo Granadino/Water-Mirror of Granada (1953) and Fuego en Castilla/Fire in Castile (1956–59), display a continuity with his earlier film-pedagogical work during the missions. I argue that they embody his own response to, and technological revision of, the epistemological dispositif that he had helped to redefine during the mid 1930s. The pedagogic missions were one of the first measures of the new Republican regime: a trust (patronato) was founded in May 1931 under the presidency of Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, a well-respected pedagogue who had been championing notions of educational reform for decades. Its activities were already underway by the end of the year, and a first tour was launched on 16 December. The concept was simple: cultural activists (student volunteers, young artists, teachers and intellectuals) were commissioned to bring ‘culture’ (books and songs, paintings, theatre plays, choirs, photographs and films) to the poorest and most backward regions of the country, to acquaint their inhabitants with the national cultural heritage. The mainly educational purpose of the missions was intended to support the work of local teachers. The missionaries, however, conceived of their activities as a holistic form of interaction, more in line with contemporary NGOs and based on modern pedagogical approaches, in which the transmission of culture through enjoyment and participation played a pivotal role.7 The missionaries were supported by mobile libraries, gramophones, film projectors and stages, as well as copies of the most famous paintings of El Greco, Velázquez, Murillo or Goya, as part of a travelling museum, or museo circulante del pueblo. Armed with these apparatuses, the missions travelled throughout various Spanish regions over several years. Although they usually affirmed their commitment to ideological independence, they encountered some resistance among the more traditional, reactionary groups in the small villages they visited. They also depended on the political support of the left-wing government, so when a conservative coalition took office in November 1933, the institutional backup for the missions diminished from 1934 onwards. Even under these more difficult circumstances, however, the missions continued their activities until the Civil War put a definitive end to the experience in its original form.8 Against this historical background, Spanish cultural history has usually viewed these experiences as examples of that last ‘silver age’ of liberal national culture from the late 1920s and the Republican period of 1931 to 1936. In this interpretation, the activities are presented as a contrast to the cultural ‘wasteland’ of Franco’s dictatorship after 1939. Since the return of democracy in the late 1970s, there has also been a strong political interest within progressive cultural circles in recovering those liberal traditions that the new Spain could relate to.9 Yet in this ‘rediscovery’ of the missions’ work, cinema has traditionally been subsumed as just one among many other activities,10 and this is especially true for the forms of spectatorship the activists encountered and encouraged, which have not yet received the attention they deserve. There are good reasons for focusing on cinema. It stood out from the broader programme of the missions, receiving the second-highest level of funding after the libraries, a budget that was apparently utilized efficiently. According to a report filed to the trust in 1934, during the first two years the missions had staged 2395 film screenings with a great deal of success:11 audiences were fascinated, and the projections were often perceived as highlights by both the missionaries and the viewers. Apart from these projections, cinema and photography were also used to register the activities of the missions, providing a visual record of the project. More than 9000 photographs were taken and about 40 16mm documentary films were shot by the missionaries. From these, only a handful survived; Val del Omar worked on them intensively, as did, in due course, filmmakers Arturo Ruiz Castillo and Rafael Gil, and director of photography Cecilio Paniagua.12 The moving pictures were used to educate and entertain, but the astonishment they usually engendered in their audience permeated the experiences in a way that clearly went beyond traditional pedagogy. In many cases activists were bringing cinema to groups of people who had no previous contact with the medium or with the cultural world of modernity: The impression one gets from these villages is that among them exists a virginity, that they face a lot of things for the first time. Childish people that are now waking up after a sleep of centuries and for whom everything is unparalleled, new. [There is a] huge eagerness to learn, to know about the things of the world and of life.13 Conscious of the intrinsic value of these episodes, activists set out to report them accurately and at length: they wrote down their first-hand impressions, they photographed the reaction of the viewers, producing some of the most striking pictures of film reception ever shot (figure 1), and even recorded some films about the responses.14 Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Children react to the screenings by the Missions. Image taken from Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas. Septiembre de 1931 – diciembre de 1933 (Madrid: S. Aguirre Impresor, 1934), p. 21. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Children react to the screenings by the Missions. Image taken from Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas. Septiembre de 1931 – diciembre de 1933 (Madrid: S. Aguirre Impresor, 1934), p. 21. The missions embodied, therefore, a project of popular pedagogy in line with the spirit of the new Republic, but they were also connected to a tradition that went back to the late 19th century. During that period a group of professors had begun to experiment with innovative pedagogical approaches outside the university classroom, where they could teach without having to adhere to Catholic doctrine. In such a spirit they founded in 1876 the Institución Libre de Enseñanza in Madrid. Their reforming initiatives were followed by the establishment of a National Pedagogic Museum in 1887, the implementation of diverse strategies to stimulate international scientific exchange (the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas in 1907), and so on. The missions were one of the last iterations of this tradition, but they were not influenced by it alone; other, more recent cultural initiatives also had a significant effect upon their work. That the missions conceived cinema as one of the main strands of their activities reflects a trend that went beyond national borders and connected the missions to specific film-cultural developments from the early 1920s onwards, relating to film clubs, projections or magazines in avant-garde circles. It would, however, be misleading to read these enterprises as focusing solely on the implementation of a project in terms of high modernism. As Malte Hagener indicates, film-cultural initiatives of the avant garde presented a heterogeneity of practices, references and values usually connected to pedagogic enterprises and generally forgotten or neglected in traditional film-historical accounts: education was a central element ‘in any attempt at restructuring the power relations in the cinema’.15 Spain is in this regard a textbook case: intense film-cultural activities were starting to flourish by the end of the decade within literary circles, early film clubs and cultural magazines with an international orientation. Local avant-garde productions were, however, still missing; for years this had to be an ‘avant garde without films’,16 but one closely connected to other cultural initiatives with educational goals. By the end of the decade initiatives of this kind, linking European urban centres, had been through a process of growing institutionalization, which was also reflected in government policies. In 1928 an International Educational Cinematographic Institute (IECI, 1928–38) had been established in Rome following the first International Congress of Cinema, held in Paris in 1926. As Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez correctly points out, in these and other congresses cinema ‘was discussed as much as a social and political form as it was an art form. Film culture travelled, and with it, ideas about the medium’s function in society beyond elite cultural circles and aesthetics.’17 Art, politics and pedagogy often went hand in hand, and were part of the multifaceted nature of the international film culture of the time. In Spain, with its high level of illiteracy, cinema was soon being discussed as a pedagogic instrument. The medium still spoke the global language of silent images, and it was therefore capable, on a local level, of reaching those parts of society that had been traditionally left behind by the forces of literate modernity. Educational interests were especially strong among intellectual circles, and a first Congreso Español de Cinematografía, organized by the film weekly La Pantalla, was by 1928 already promoting cinema as a pedagogical tool. Ceremoniously opened by the Minister for Public Instruction, the congress participants also argued for the installation of local cinematheques in small villages and the promotion of scientific and didactic works.18 In a further example of this characteristic combination of artistic and pedagogical interests, the leading publication of the Spanish avant garde, La Gaceta Literaria, was actively pushing for the educational usage of the medium, while specialist magazines like Popular Films or Revista de Cine Educativo had become very supportive of the missions’ work. The Cineclub Español, originally established around the avant-garde circles of Gaceta Literaria, invited the director of the Roman IECI, Luciano de Feo, to give a talk for Spanish audiences in February 1930.19 Grassroots work was accompanied by state initiatives. In June 1930 a Spanish Committee for Educational Cinema (Comité Español de Cinema Educativo) was called to action under the guidance of Ernesto Giménez Caballero, who became its first general secretary. As an example of the political intricacies arising at the end of the 1920s, which would be crucial in the years up to the beginning of the Civil War in 1936, the writer and director of the mainly progressive Gaceta Literaria, who was the creative force behind two avant-garde short films (Esencia de Verbena and Noticiario de Cineclub, both from 1930), was also one of the first mouthpieces of fascism in Spain.20 He also found time to attend the first two congresses of the international film avant garde, in La Sarraz in 1929 and in Brussels at the end of 1930. The tasks of the new committee under Giménez Caballero’s leadership included the preparation of lists of films to be used in schools, as well as the organization of film screenings and discussions among audiences. The engagement with reformist policies such as the missions was not, however, shared through the whole avant-garde spectrum of the time. While the first missionaries were trying to reduce the distance between the urban centres and the poorest areas by presenting an affirmative view of the challenges they had to face in their photographs, documentary films and reports, Luis Buñuel filmed his own exploitative take on these problems in Las Hurdes/Tierra sin pan (1933), exaggerating the backwardness of the regions and their outmoded ways of life.21 Yet if one had to choose a single person to represent the connection of artistic initiatives and pedagogic approaches that culminated in the missions, it would have to be José Val del Omar. A Wunderkind and pioneer of the Spanish avant garde, in the early 1920s Val del Omar had already spent some time in Paris and, as Víctor Erice has noted, some of the concepts then circulating within avant-garde writings clearly had a strong influence on his later work and connected him to the most vibrant film culture of the time.22 Among these are Louis Delluc’s idea of photogénie (in Val del Omar’s private library there is a copy of Charlot by Delluc from 1921) and, most importantly, Germaine Dulac’s thoughts on ‘integral cinema’. This seemed to provide the basis for Val del Omar’s idea of ‘cinegraphy’, a new artistic-pedagogic approach with mystical undertones, which championed the idea that the moving image would help overcome the divide between heart and brain, instinct and consciousness, art and science. These seminal ideas would be of importance in the way Val del Omar approached his work for the missions 10 years later; against this conceptual background, the impression of encountering the rural audiences generated a central creative vector for the rest of his career. Back from Paris, Val del Omar prepared between 1924 and 1925 in Granada his first film, En un rincón de Andalucía, which reflected his interests in the form of a visual poem of the Andalusian city. Disappointed with the results he destroyed it; yet he continued to reflect on the nature of the medium, focusing his attention on its effects on the audience. In some of this early work he had already started to conceive of cinema as the ‘supreme art of experience’, as he pointed out in one of his first interviews in 1928 for La Pantalla.23 In 1930 Val del Omar had joined the Spanish Committee for Educational Cinema, mentioned above, where he developed a project for the use of ‘microfilms’ in schools; he also worked on a more general catalogue of films to be used in the classroom. The difficulties he had to face during the implementation of these initiatives led to his work in the missions, apparently enabled through the mediation of the poet Federico García Lorca, whom he knew from his home town.24 Val del Omar, who over the years had acquired expertise in technical aspects of cinematography, soon took up a post in the ‘cinema and still images’ section (Cine y Proyecciones Fijas). He also made himself useful on the ground by working as projectionist, documentarist and photographer. He started the collaboration in autumn 1932, made many of the 9000 photographs reflecting the work of the missions, and also filmed some of the documentaries. Both forms of expression reveal an unusual interest in the reaction of the audiences to the activities of the missions, and especially to cinema.25 Starting in December 1931, the missions worked with 26 film projectors in 16mm (Kodaskope and Argus) and two 35mm machines (Zeiss Ikon), and for the first two years they projected silent films in the villages and hamlets of most of the Spanish territory: Ávila, Cáceres, Soria, Guadalajara, Cuenca, Teruel, Huesca, Madrid, Segovia, Valencia, Murcia, La Coruña, Pontevedra, Orense, Lugo, Asturias, Santander, Burgos, León, Zamora, Toledo, Lérida and Granada. From December 1933 onwards, activists were also able to use a Bauer machine to screen sound films.26 As to the kind of films being shown, it is difficult to determine the titles screened in a particular session since the films were constantly changing. One can, however, have a general impression of the programme based on certain categories. The archives list 142 short pedagogical films, among them 24 on agricultural matters, 43 on geography, 21 on natural sciences, 18 about industry, 17 with a clear instructional goal, eight about physics, seven about health, and four addressing historical subjects. Most of them came from Kodak’s pedagogic section, which provided documentary films in exchange for a copy of the films recorded by the activists during their missions.27 The poet Carmen Conde, who was a member of the International Educational Cinematographic Institute in Rome and took part in the missions, spoke in 1932 of further documentary films coming from other sources, addressing topics such as the city of Paris or whaling. The missionaries also screened fiction films, mainly comedies and animation pieces, including some episodes of Felix the Cat, five or six feature films by Charlie Chaplin, and one known as La princesa rana/The Frog Princess.28 Chaplin’s films seem to have played an essential role in the screenings and were considered by activists and audiences alike to be a highlight of the evenings. Val del Omar, who could not remember specific titles among the ones screened by the missions, made an exception for his admired Chaplin – The Tramp (1915), The Fireman (1916) and Easy Street (1917) were all central in his recollections. Much of what impressed him from his work at the missions came from watching audiences react to the films of the British comedian.29 An evening programme could include up to seven films, and was usually divided into two parts. The missionaries first showed three or four titles with a clear pedagogical goal, which were usually stopped at certain scenes and commented on while the activists stressed the practical aspects of special interest for the audiences (for instance, with films on agriculture, irrigation or baking bread). Then came the comedies as the highlight of the evening, which frequently closed the programme.30 Not only were the titles constantly changing, but projection spaces had to be continuously redefined and were usually improvised. The screenings were intended to reproduce the spatial arrangement typical for cinematic projection, but they also had to deal with the challenging circumstances found in casinos, schools, town halls or open squares where electric power was not necessarily available. From these usually improvised locations, activists reported on experiments and explorations, haphazard and contingent experiences, and on the confrontation with the moving image. The reports from 1934 pay special attention to the reaction of the audience, frequently referring to the surprise triggered by the sheer existence of moving images: ‘For them, it was a revelation; they accepted it […] with the astonishment of a miracle’.31 Younger members of the audience were particularly moved by their experience: ‘The attention and interest for the films and the lectures was wonderful; especially these [the lectures] were listened to in great silence. They did not know cinema and the first pictures were greeted by the children with cheers and great joy’; ‘Cinema caused a feverish enthusiasm among the children, they greeted it with wild screams’.32 These accounts paid special attention to the creation of a communicative space. Along with the new images, the projections also provided a new spatial disposition around a new medium and a new spectator as part of an experience in flux: this was guided by a specific idea of the classic screening atmosphere but also forced to react to a new set of circumstances. Cinema revealed itself in cases like these as an ‘event and encounter, taking place’, not far from the notion of interface as formulated by Lev Manovich, but also tellingly close to the dispositif of the early years of the medium.33 Kessler has already explored this line of argument, stressing the implications of bringing together technology, spectatorship and text to illuminate the transformation of the early cinema of attractions: the concept of dispositif could, from this perspective, ‘actually take into account different uses of one and the same text within different exhibition contexts, or different institutional framings’.34 Simultaneously, the reformulation of the dispositif based on the grounded empirical evidence by the missionaries can help us historicize the ideal spectator of this (asynchronous form of) cinema of attractions, and explore its specific variations in contexts such as those encountered by the Spanish cultural activists. The urban, pleasure-seeking audiences postulated by Tom Gunning and others in their explorations of early film seem to have little in common with the unschooled, illiterate, pre-modern groups found in the Spanish villages. The way that Thomas Elsaesser has developed the concept of diegesis in his exploration of early cinema may help us to apprehend these situations more productively. Made famous in literary studies by Gérard Genette, diegesis is usually referred to as the ‘reality of the fiction’, the ‘world’ created by the images on the screen. In contrast, Elsaesser argues that given the multiple kinds of interrelationships between screen space and audience space, technologies and institutional contexts, early cinema did not make a clear distinction between diegetic and extra-diegetic levels. The music performed in the auditorium, the lecturer, the frontal staging of the film’s mise-en-scene and the actors directly addressing the audience all helped to continuously cross the borders between both worlds. Thus the diegesis of early film was less stable and predetermined, and was ‘dynamically constituted by the interplay between what occurred on the screen and in the auditorium’.35 There are clear echoes of this in the work of the missions, where films were usually screened as part of a larger cultural programme and where missionaries, addressing the individual members of the audience, often acted as lecturers interested in generating this kind of diegetic space between images and spectators. Integrated within a set of activities such as speeches, projection of slides on geographical, historical or artistic subjects, or musical interludes that stressed the act of display, projectionists sought interaction through the use of different media. Chaplin’s tramp character ‘Charlot’, for instance, ‘which was shown at the end, was usually accompanied by music by Beethoven and Mozart. We chose those parts in which cheerfulness is mixed with melancholy, which are so frequent in both musicians and so in accordance with a lot of themes by Charlot.’36 The similarities with the diegetic spaces of early cinema also point to the need to focus on the effects of the (changing) programme offered by the missions rather than on particular films – on the interactions with the audiences created through an arrangement designed to encourage exchange through different means. Poetry, projections, lectures and cinema were often presented as different elements of an evening programme. [This] would usually comprise four films, apart from the talk that was illustrated with projections and which was where attention was mainly focused; from the two films [shown during the screenings], one was used to support what had been said during the talk, and the other one (explained or not) was like a break or a parenthesis within the session. Sometimes the talk was supported by a film and in this case the screenings had a free topic and a break. We used to read ballads and poetry by Juan Ramón and Machado and had usually some music both during the breaks and accompanying the films, when these were not explained, especially the comedies.37 As one of the participants retrospectively noted, ‘Films had to be explained because everything shown in them was a world completely unknown to those audiences. They were silent films and they would have been impossible to understand.’38 One does not have to go back to the early years of cinema, however, to find fitting precursors to these screening practices. They also call to mind examples that relate the missions to the film culture of the 1920s: screening sessions that combined art films, revivals, genre productions, artistic interventions and commentaries, all of them inducing a heterogeneous viewing experience that blocked the effect of narrative integration. The cinema of attractions recovered in this context its original dialectic form, not as a formalist description of textual features, but as a ‘dynamic interchange between spectator and screen’39 that goes beyond the individual film and focuses our attention instead on the specific circumstances of reception. The combination of contemplative immersion and active participation in the practices may sound paradoxical, yet it seems accurately to describe the phenomenological experience created around the screenings (the moments of wonder and the intense interaction with the missionaries), which connected them to certain forms of spectatorship observed both in early film practices and in avant-garde circles throughout the 1920s. If the passages above describe how films were being seen (under which circumstances), a close reading of the reports also offers insights into the way they were being watched (by groups of individuals with their own idiosyncrasies), according to the distinction proposed by Christian Keathley.40 Together with the institutional framing and a specific viewing context, audiences and activists also found certain cinematic forms that were especially appropriate to the experience created around the work of the missions. Industrial titles, pedagogic documentaries and slapstick comedies like those of Chaplin all belonged to a set of films more interested in showing, explaining or instructing than in telling a story. They also delivered productive material for the ‘attractional display’ in the core of the dispositif.41 Integrated into this broader programme, traditional oppositions such as realism and illusionism, documentary and fiction, do not seem to play any significant role in the way films were consumed, a process whereby the viewer’s curiosity was central to the active engagement with the images. This cinema established a different relation to its spectator than that formed by narrative cinema: it was an experience of instants, of specific moments and not of unfolding narratives. Rather than being involved with dramatic action or character psychology, the spectator was the protagonist of what Vivian Sobchack calls a ‘primary engagement’ with the images, with the ‘sense and sensibility of materiality itself’.42 Familiar binaries of a conventional conceptualization of spectatorship, such as passive and active or tradition and modernity, vanished in this process. Even the images themselves seem to belong to an uncertain realm between fiction and reality, which had to be validated through additional forms of sensorial information: The vision of cinema makes such a strong impression on them that they doubt [the difference] between the real and the fictitious; many children try to ensure that those animals that appear [on the screen], some of them known to them, others unimagined, are real and they approach the screen and tentatively touch it time and again.43 In this context of novelty, one would expect audiences to be especially moved by the extraordinary worlds brought by the educational documentaries showing outlandish activities (whaling), urban wonders (Paris) or unknown animals. Yet the virgin glance seems to have been attracted to more profane subjects, as one of the practitioners remembered some decades later in an interview: When the film showed something that was familiar to them, when a dog appeared, a cat, a horse … Look, a cat! It was a unanimous reaction, wasn’t it? They felt … how should I put it? They felt a great satisfaction in watching something familiar in those things that were astonishing to them. I think even we were a show for them.44 In the reports we find similar comments: Cinema appeals to and astonishes them; it unfolds a stream of comments; everybody talks and everybody tries to impose silence on the others […] From cinema, they are more interested in the things they already know than in the exotic ones; they are astonished by the emergence of the big city, but if in this very city a cat appears by a window, they rejoice in the image of the cat.45 I want to focus on this image of the cat by the window. It caught the attention of the audiences, who seemed to be more interested in the strangeness of the familiar world (now on the screen) than on the imposed familiarity of the strange world or technology. This reaction echoes the reports on the first film screenings by the Lumière brothers in December 1895, where the moment of astonishment among the audience arose not so much from those attractions that could be reproduced on the screen, but from what viewers could identify as part of the world they already knew: the leaves, for instance, teased by the wind in the background while the Lumières’ baby was having its breakfast. Georges Sadoul commented in the first volume of his Histoire générale du cinéma how these ‘minor details’ seem to have been of greater importance to the spectators than the exuberant attractions some of these films also offered.46 He was especially struck by the fact that newspaper reports ‘made repeated reference to incidental details like smoke, waves and specially “the trembling of the leaves through the action of the wind”’.47 He also highlighted the relevance of this nature ‘caught in the act’ (la nature prise sur le fait, as he described the work of the Lumière brothers), which has since become a topos with a long and healthy life in cinema history.48 I believe that the cat by the window, the horse, or the leaves moved by the wind call our attention to a similar phenomenon, a distinctive way of looking that was characteristic of the early-era cinemagoer or – as is the case with the mission audiences – of that viewer with ‘untrained cognitive habits’ that Tsivian found in his analysis of early cinema exhibition in Russia, in situations similar to those encountered by the Spanish missionaries. The reports present a viewer interested in spontaneity and unpredictability, in those episodes connecting images to nature, and in the surprising perspectives of a reality that he could relate to. As in the case of early cinemagoers, traditional acting, outlandish images and exotic peoples were accepted ‘without demur because they were perceived as performance, as simply a new mode of self-projection; but that the inanimate should participate in self-projection was astonishing’.49 Already on alert due to the special dispositif situation (thanks to the talks by the missionaries, the conversations with other members of the audience, the references to other activities part of the cultural programme of the missions), it was the cats, the dogs or the horses that provided the viewer with not only a recognizable element of the world they all knew, but a way to build a bridge to the screen. The images were central to the construction of a lively and social space, a context of interaction with both the missionaries and other members of the audience. These elements also offered, I believe, an index for shared knowledge and practices, an opportunity for everyone to reframe their own experiences. This was a pre-cinematic reference central to the creation of the epistemological space around the new medium. Activists often saw in the reactions of the audience the delight of recognizing the familiar world on the screen, the joy ‘of reliving life through the surprise of watching the framing of the landscape upon which their eyes had so often drifted without noticing its spatial arrangement’, as one missionary pointed out.50 The same effects were intensified on those occasions when the spectators could see themselves on the screen. When the missions returned to villages in which they had already shot some footage, they showed the inhabitants their own environment and references on the screen. The missionaries reported that ‘Said film was received with amazed joy; [it was] their own environment, their landscapes, their ways and celebrations, all of that seen on screen caused great amazement and such an enjoyment to those people that it was difficult to explain’.51 Yet there were always moments of absolute wonder, of redemption of the concrete and the transient through this new framing. Cinema was creating, in this dispositif in flux, a unique atmosphere of experience and exchange, intended to generate a very specific way of ‘being-in-the-world and participating in its unfolding, its becoming present: with all the affects, cognitive dissonances, or bodily perceptual states that this might entail’, in Elsaesser’s words.52 Eighty years prior to this characterization, Val del Omar had described his experiences with the missions in similar terms. What he found there was cinema’s capacity to transform each member of the audience into the ‘great protagonist’ (el gran protagonista), an ideal spectator with enhanced sensibility. These experiences were for him a way to specify and modify some of the notions that had been impregnating his work and theoretical reflections for more than a decade.53 During the missions he had a chance to rediscover that perceptual capacity for wonder that he had evoked in the 1920s and that connected him to contemporary authors such as Delluc and his photogénie, or Dulac and her interest in cinema as a non-narrative visual art. However, given his focus on the redemptive qualities of the medium, his romantic, usually irrational tone and his lack of interest in both a sociological dimension of cinema or in formalist readings, Val del Omar’s approach seems to be more in line with that of Béla Balázs than any other of his contemporaries. In spring 1931, just a few months before his first tenure at the missions, Val del Omar had pointed out in his lecture, ‘Sentimiento de la pedagogía kinestésica’,54 some of the ideas that would crystallize fully during his later work. He spoke, in line with the early writings of Balázs and his 1924 text Visible Man,55 of a ‘culture of the image’ capable of connecting to the sensitivity of the audience, and in which the emotional and cognitive effects would acquire a redemptive power. He also contrasted the language of the written word to the language of cinema, highlighting the intuitive, mythological, non-linguistic aspects of the medium. Against this background he was giving film pedagogy a new interpretation: ‘I don’t believe in education’, he stated; instead, he championed a ‘sensitization’ of the masses. In this he was in line with Cossío’s original plan for the missions, which apparently (and paradoxically, considering the name of the initiative) had been against a traditional pedagogic approach, instead favouring intuitional forms of communication, interactions with the audiences of the films, the visitors to the mobile exhibitions and the stimulation of the aesthetic experience through cinema, theatre or large-format reproductions of paintings.56 Val del Omar defended the necessity of a ‘kinaesthetic pedagogy’ that went beyond the ‘traditional divorce of brain and heart, instinct and consciousness’;57 in his view the individual spectator became the central point of those reception aesthetics that conceived cinema as an instrument of spiritual elevation. Val del Omar’s commitment to film-pedagogical initiatives in the early 1930s and especially to the missions worked also as a corrective to some of the principles of the avant garde. Never really interested in its promise of reconciliation of art and life through formalist aesthetics or in the political side of film culture, the missions helped him to forge the central pillar of his artistic project: for the rest of his career, and despite his interest in technological development and in a redefinition of the film apparatus, Val del Omar stuck to a holistic, pre-modern conception of life and subject that he hoped to restore through his own reformulation of the cinematic dispositif. Through the involvement in the missions he was also recovering motives and impulses that had marked his formative years in the 1920s: those of a vernacular declination of the avant-garde sensibilities that located its main disruptive forces in the reinterpretation of traditions as equally local and universal, lyrical and metaphysical. The composer Manuel de Falla and especially the poet Lorca had been central to Val del Omaŕs formative years, as they championed similar ideas in his native Granada. As his later creations would show, Val del Omar found in their work an inspiration for his own take on avant-garde cinema,58 clearly differentiated from those approaches typical in contemporary urban environments like Madrid or Paris. As soon as his work put him in contact with the rural audiences, his ideal spectator (already the pivotal point of his cinematic project) started to mutate into the child that he had seen reacting for the first time to the cinema: ‘For me every spectator is a big child in love with the extraordinary’, he wrote decades later, looking back at his work in the 1930s.59 Children’s reactions had been very frequent in the reports and in the photographs Val del Omar shot for the missions, images that usually focused on their concentrated gaze as they discovered the medium. These pictures were an ode to cinema’s mesmerizing qualities but in their focus on reactions they also highlighted the importance of the audience. The photographs, as Jordana Mendelson points out, had ‘an efficient, distinctively modern feel characterized by mid-range focus, tight though not radical cropping, and direct or slightly upward viewpoint’. These aesthetic qualities tended ‘to dignify the rural spectator’s fascination with and wonder for the performances and lessons of the Misiones’.60 At the same time, in their own reports the missionaries emphasized the specific qualities of these children as spectators, and compared them favourably to other members of the audience. In some villages old women had considered cinema to be ‘witchcraft’. In general, old men watch cinema and listen to music, poetry and talks with pleasure; but just like someone hears a fairy tale, that, apart from the momentary pleasure of its beauty, will not change in any way his life trajectory. Young people, however, they pay attention in a more quiet and intense fashion; their sensibility is open to every call, they feel nearer to what they see and with the hope of traveling the horizons that reveal themselves.61 In the impression made by cinema on the children of rural, isolated communities (its perceptual, cognitive and affective processes) Val del Omar had come across what he saw as the specificity of the medium. He rapidly gave these experiences a spiritual reading.62 In 1935, while still working for the missions, he founded the Association of Cinema Believers (Asociación de Creyentes del Cinema), and launched a manifesto explaining the core of his ‘mecha-mysticism’ – the conviction that cinema had the power to elevate realism, enhance reality and enable an encounter with the transcendental. This spiritual side was also rooted in mechanical terms; technology should, in his view, contribute to changing the perceptual reactions of the audiences and also to achieving a new level of consciousness on the basis of an encounter with the divine in nature. These conceptual and practical explorations came to a dramatic halt with the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. After its end in 1939, Val del Omar oriented his career to reproduce the immersive and participative effects he had experienced during the missions through other means, especially through a modification of the cinematic apparatus to encourage haptic reactions in the spectators. Throughout his professional life he registered about 100 patents, most of them conceived to achieve these effects through an innovative use of sound and colour, of the screen, of the impression of depth. Through his technological inventions he also sought the creation of a new dispositif, capable of replicating the transcendental experience he had encountered among those audiences. His experimental films from the 1950s and 1960s offer three specific examples of the application of this line of work: Val del Omar started his short film Water-Mirror of Granada in 1953 and worked on it until 1955; this and Fire in Castile were the first two instalments of his Tríptico elemental de España/Elemental Triptych of Spain, usually seen as the culmination of his career. These are also the works that best represent the ways in which poetics and technology were intertwined in his creations. They were intended to illustrate both three primal elements (water, fire and earth) and three Spanish regions (Andalusia, Castile, Galicia). The third part of the tryptic, Acariño galaico, was filmed in 1961 but never edited in Val del Omar’s lifetime. Water-Mirror of Granada was an audiovisual symphony on the Andalusian city that combined the music of de Falla and of flamenco, images of gardens, landscapes, fountains (fluidity and water are recurring tropes in the film) and close-ups of the local population. As explored by Matt Losada, the construction of space and narration in both Water-Mirror of Granada and Fire in Castile functions to counter classical spectatorial expectations ‘by cutting off the possibility of coherent and recognizable diegetic space into which a spectator could settle’,63 and by using defamiliarization to induce the perception of the ineffable. Instead, Val del Omar seemed to be more interested in evoking in his spectators that ‘primary engagement’ – the joy, cries, the fascination, the haptic responses (like the children eager to touch the screen to comprehend the nature of its images) – he had encountered during his time with the missions. To achieve this, he went beyond traditional cinematic means: In the first of the films Val del Omar used his ‘diaphonic sound’, a system he had patented in 1944, a few years after the creation of stereo. While the latter was usually based on lateral sound sources, Val del Omar’s invention had one sound source located behind the screen, transmitting the sound associated with the images, while a second speaker was positioned behind the audience, at the back of the hall, emitting echoes and sound reflections intended to relate to the spectator in a more profound and primary form. The ideal viewer would then sit in the centre of the room, where both sources collided, and would be confronted with both channels competing for his attention: their function was therefore not to surround him (and to create an illusion of realistic audible perspective) but to generate a contrapunctual dialogue between the two sound sources.64 This provided sensory immersion, while the collusion of both sources was intended to activate a new sense of awareness in the spectator. The oscillation from contemplative immersion to active participation observed in the practices of the missions was now translated into his own poetics of film. The goal was to achieve a ‘palpitant, personal, lyric, mystic spectacle that would give us the emotional novelty of ecstasy’.65 This, Val del Omar stated, was not to be achieved ‘through multiple channels’ (at the time he had already experimented with eight of them). Instead, he saw that the ‘great leap’ of his invention lay in addressing the function of the spectator in a different way, ‘changing from monologue to dialogue’.66 He was pointing once more to that spectator who was impressed by the spectacle before his eyes but was also stimulated to respond actively to it. In his modified dispositif the dialogue between both channels was also impelling the viewer to experience cinema beyond the images on the screen and the sounds attached to them. Some of the copies of Water-Mirror were also enhanced by a second invention of Val del Omar, the so-called ‘a-panoramic overflow of the image’, which also helped to cross the borders between the diegetic and extra-diegetic levels by seeking to involve the spectator in the cinematic experience and to reach his subconscious. The screen, traditionally seen as the most stable element in the cinematic dispositif, should in this case not only change its size or format, but rather its very own limits. The position of the spectator had therefore to be redefined. Val del Omar’s goal here was to stimulate the area of peripheral vision around the screen through the projection of a second set of non-figurative and blurred images. Spreading over a surface four times bigger than the screen, these would flow over the ceiling, walls and floor providing immersion for the viewers. The surrounding images were to be printed in the spaces between frames of the film strip and generated by a special set of lenses, as Val del Omar explained in his intervention during the IX International Congress of Cinematic Technique in Turin during September and October 1957.67Although the implementation of these techniques was not always easy, some selected audiences, like those for a projection at the Berlin Film Festival in 1956, could enjoy this immersive effect: a diegesis of in-between spaces, located between the images of the screen and the auditorium, was now embracing the spectators. Fire in Castile, the second title of the series, was Val del Omar’s personal interpretation of the Spanish Holy Week (Easter), and was based mainly on baroque religious imagery conserved in the National Sculpture Museum of Valladolid and in a renaissance chapel. This film, introduced with a verse by Lorca, shared with Water-Mirror of Granada many of its formal traits (disruptive-associative montage, lack of narrative structure) and also had a diaphonic soundtrack (again combining classical music, uncanny voices, sounds of water, storms or unidentified noises). In this case the implemented technological innovation was the ‘tactile-vision’. This was Val del Omar’s personal approach to the idea of what he termed a ‘film in relief’, to the generation of a sensation of depth that could increase the haptic possibilities of the medium. It was also a response to some decisive episodes he had experienced during his work for the missions:68 young spectators for whom touching the images on the screen and the paintings was the natural way of validating the reality of what they were seeing. Instead of going back to stereoscopic technology, Val del Omar was now generating this effect through the projection of a pulsating light over rotating surfaces in order to highlight their material texture. For his technical contributions to the development of cinema with this particular film, Val del Omar received an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1961.69 In The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) there is a famous scene in which the camera apprehends Ana, the main character, as she reacts to the screening of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) in her Castilian village during the 1940s. The film has been brought to her by a mobile projectionist in a similar way to the Misiones Pedagógicas in the 1930s. In this scene of his highly stylised film, Erice was able to capture a moment of documentary purity as he recorded the authentic reaction of the child Ana Torrent to pictures unknown to her. Erice was filming the actress, not the character, and was recording a moment of wonder: ‘that is really the moment in the film that touches me the most, even today, and I truly believe that was the best thing I’ve ever shot’,70 he commented 25 years later. Erice knew the work of Val del Omar on the missions and, considering the similarities between the photographs produced by the missionaries and his shots (figures 2 and 3), it is clear that with this particular scene he was paying homage to both the work of the missions and to that spectator that Val del Omar had ‘discovered’ and put at the centre of his poetic-cinematic project. But this was also a homage to a certain purity in the cinema experience that the missionaries had frequently praised and that their photographs sought to represent. It is tempting to read the photographs, reports and films of the missions and focus on the timeless qualities of these experiences. The various ways in which they have been employed since their emergence in the mid 1930s reinforce this point.71 More productive synergies emerge, however, if one considers the experiences in relation to the forms of spectatorship they embodied. From this perspective the reports enable us to reconstruct certain aspects of the spectators’ glance, especially their recurring interest in those familiar and unstaged elements of the screen that may also be found in other forms of spectatorship related to the cinema of attractions. In this context, programming played a central role in the activities: set against a complex interaction of technology, spectatorship and text, the films achieved maximum effect when in combination with public talks, music or readings, and when there was an active viewer at the centre. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Image taken from Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedag򦨣as. Septiembre de 1931 diciembre de 1933 (Madrid: S. Aguirre Impresor, 1934), p. 92. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Image taken from Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedag򦨣as. Septiembre de 1931 diciembre de 1933 (Madrid: S. Aguirre Impresor, 1934), p. 92. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Ana in The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973). Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Ana in The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973). This essay has focused on the dispositif created by the cinematic activities of the missions in order to generate productive genealogies, proposing a reformulation of the cinema of attractions as a way to connect the missions to the particular circumstances of the Spanish avant garde – to its limitations as a project of high modernism, but also to its educational initiatives. While the films screened by the mobile apparatuses of the missions can hardly be considered as classical avant-gardist products, the forms of spectatorship they encouraged, as well as the institutional and technical settings they generated, reveal a particularly productive connection with those film-cultural initiatives from the 1920s that found a broader basis in Spain after the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931. The second reading that connected the missions to later cinematic developments considered the impact of these particular forms of film reception on the work of Val del Omar. Through his creative bending of aesthetics and technology he tried to replicate in those films the particular effects he had witnessed among the virgin audiences he encountered with the missions, reimagining a dispositif of wonder that helped to redefine the boundaries of the medium. Footnotes 1 Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas. Septiembre de 1931 – diciembre de 1933 (Madrid: S. Aguirre Impresor, 1934), p. 40. In line with the spirit of the missions, this report was presented as a collaborative enterprise; texts and photographs were not individually signed by their authors. All translations into English in this essay are my own. 2 Apart from the report mentioned in fn. 1, see also Patronato de las Misiones Pedagógicas, Memoria de la Misión pedagógico-social en Sanabria (Zamora) (Madrid: S. Aguirre Impresor, 1935). The missions received substantial attention in newspapers like El Sol and Luz, and magazines like Residencia, Popular Film, Revista Internacional del Cinema Educativo. See Jordana Mendelson, ‘Las misiones pedagógicas en la prensa de 1935 a 1938’, Boletín de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza, vol. 40/41, no. 2 (2001), p. 63. 3 Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 145. 4 Tom Gunning, ‘An aesthetic of astonishment: early cinema and the (in)credulous spectator’, in Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions. Ways of Seeing Films (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 114–33. 5 Frank Kessler, ‘The cinema of attractions as dispositif’, in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), p. 61. 6 ‘Val del Omar drove the truck and fixed it, he loaded and unloaded the wooden crates with the pictures, he prepared the screening places and distributed the pictures at the walls, he was responsible for the electric power, the sound and the projectors, he handled the visitors and explained the works.’ Horacio Fernández and Javier Ortiz-Echagüe, ‘Val del Omar y la documentación gráfica de Misiones Pedagógicas’, Desbordamiento de Val del Omar (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 2010), p. 81. 7 Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas, p. 3. 8 After October 1936 the missions were employed mainly for political propaganda, which was channeled through a Sección de Propaganda Cultural. Further developments in 1937 stressed the ideological reorientation of their activities. The end of the war in 1939 put a definitive end to the missions. See María García Alonso, ‘“Necesitamos un pueblo”. Genealogía de las misiones pedagógicas’, in Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga (ed.), Val del Omar y las Misiones Pedagógicas (Madrid: Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia, Residencia de Estudiantes, 2003), p. 94. 9 Some early examples are the November 1981 special issue on the Second Republic of the intellectual journal of reference Revista de Occidente, where the missions and their cinema are widely discussed, or Eugenio Otero Urtaza, Las Misiones Pedagógicas: Una experiencia de educación popular (con un testimonio de Rafael Dieste) (A Coruña: Ediciós do Castro, 1982). The Law on the Spanish Historical Heritage from 1985 mentions directly in its preamble ‘our best intellectual, legal and democratic tradition, as can be seen in the positive legacy passed down with the Law of 13 May 1933’, referring thus to the cultural initiatives during the Republic, albeit not directly to the missions. See also Alejandro Tiana, Las Misiones Pedagógicas (Madrid: Catarata, 2016); and, exemplifying this re-evaluation of the work of the missions, Eugenio Otero Urtaza (ed.), Las Misiones Pedagógicas 1931–1936 (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales/Residencia de estudiantes, 2006), which accompanied an exhibition that opened in Madrid in 2006 (the 75th anniversary of the funding of the initiative) and until 2017 could be seen in a dozen Spanish cities. 10 Some relevant exceptions in this regard are María García Alonso, ‘Intuiciones visuales para pueblos olvidados. La utilización del cine en las Misiones Pedagógicas de la Segunda República Española’, Cahiers de civilisation espagnole contemporaine, no. 11 (2013), <https://journals.openedition.org/ccec/4861> accessed 19 October 2020; Javier Ortiz-Echagüe, ‘Ver cine por primera vez: la experiencia de Misiones Pedagógicas (1931–1936)’, in Julio Montero and José Luis Cabeza (eds), Por el precio de una entrada: estudios sobre historia social del cine (Madrid: Rialp, 2010), pp. 133–59. Enrique Fibla Gutiérrez also mentions and comments on them in A Pedagogical Impulse: Noncommercial Film Cultures in Spain (1931–1936) (Dissertation: Concordia University, Quebec, 2018). For a more general contextualization of the cinematic activities of the missions and the role played by José Val del Omar, see Vicente J. Benet’s outstanding El cine español. Una historia cultural (Barcelona: Paidós, 2012), pp. 115, 348–50. 11 Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas, p. 90. 12 Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga, ‘Val del Omar multimístico en Misiones’, in Urtaza (ed.), Las Misiones Pedagógicas 1931–1936, p. 382. 13 Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas, p. 37. 14 Ortiz-Echagüe, ‘Ver cine por primera vez’, p. 143. 15 Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), p. 170. 16 Román Gubern, Proyector de luna. La generación del 27 y el cine (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1999), pp. 146–201. 17 Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez, ‘Film called into action: Juan Piqueras, León Moussinac, Harry Alan Potamkin and the Internationale of film pedagogy’, Screen, vol. 58, no. 4 (2017), p. 416. See also Fibla-Gutiérrez, A Pedagogical Impulse. 18 ‘El Congreso Español de Cinematografía’, ABC, 17 October 1928, p. 10. 19 Gubern, Proyector de luna, pp. 332–34. 20 For a short but rich overview of Giménez Caballero’s avant-garde initiatives, see Juan Manuel Bonet, Diccionario de las Vanguardias en España, 1907–1936 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2007), pp. 290–92. 21 Jordana Mendelson, Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture and the Modern Nation (University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University, 2005). 22 Víctor Erice, ‘El llanto de las máquinas’, in Desbordamiento Val del Omar (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 2010), p. 262. Rafael R. Tranche (based on the analysis of exhibitions dedicated to Val del Omar in 2010 and 2011 and on his critical revaluation in the last three decades) reads these connections with the avant garde more critically, in Tranche, ‘Panóptico Val del Omar: de la pantalla al palimpsesto’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, no. 69 (2012), pp. 120–33. Later in this essay I argue that this connection can be defended based on a broader understanding of the avant garde beyond the traditional categories of high modernism. 23 José Val del Omar, ‘Un muchacho español logra dos inventos que revolucionarán el arte del cinema’, La pantalla, no. 40, 30 September 1928, p. 620. 24 Rafael Llano, La imagen-duende. García Lorca y Val del Omar (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2014), p. 56. 25 See Sáenz de Buruaga, ‘Valdelomar multimístico’, p. 383. On the question of the authorship of the photographs (published anonymously), see also Fernández and Ortiz-Echagüe, ‘Val del Omar y la documentación gráfica de Misiones Pedagógicas’. 26 The material list also included electrical generators, as some of the areas did not yet have access to electricity. Patronato de las Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas, p. 85. The report from 1935 lists 36 machines. Patronato de las Misiones Pedagógicas, Memoria de la Misión, p. 95. 27 Román Gubern, Val del Omar, Cinetista (Granada: Los libros de la Estrella, 2004), p. 25. See also the list of Kodak films in Llano, La imagen-duende, p. 170. Ortiz-Echagüe points out that by 1934 the number of films used had already grown to 411, in Ver cine por primera vez, p. 138. 28 Llano, La imagen-duende, p. 59. See also Gonzalo Menéndez-Pidal, ‘Algunos recuerdos de Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal’, in Urtaza (ed.), Las Misiones Pedagógicas 1931–1936, p. 411. 29 Llano, La imagen-duende, p. 65. See also the interviews in the documentary film Las Misiones Pedagógicas 1931–1936 (G. Tapia, 2007), where other examples are mentioned and the figure of Chaplin is also highlighted. 30 Luis Santullano, ‘Patronato de las misiones pedagógicas’, Residencia, no. 1 (1933), p. 12. 31 Patronato de las Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas, p. 32. 32 Ibid., pp. 42, 56. 33 Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), pp. 116, 131. 34 Kessler, ‘The cinema of attractions as dispositif’, p. 61. 35 Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, p. 203. 36 Patronato de las Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas, p. 54. 37 Ibid. 38 In the documentary film Las Misiones Pedagógicas 1931–1936, min. 28. 39 See Malte Hagener, ‘Programming attractions: avant-garde exhibition practice in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, p. 266. For the Spanish case, see the analysis of the 21 sessions at the Cineclub Español in Madrid between 1928 and 1931, in Gubern, Proyector de luna, pp. 279–389. 40 Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 7. 41 Kessler, ‘The cinema of attractions as dispositif’, p. 62. 42 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 64. Sobchack opposes this primary engagement to a secondary engagement ‘with and recognition of either “subject positions” or characters’, which she sees as privileged by classical narrative cinema. 43 Patronato de las Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones pedagógicas, p. 58. 44 In the documentary film Las Misiones Pedagógicas 1931–1936, min. 31. 45 Patronato de las Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas, p. 54. ‘José Val del Omar remembers that when they showed a film of New York water supply, the audience had their head in the clouds but when another one showed the sheep shearing in Extremadura, the effect was strong and they made commentaries such as “look how that one limps”’. Eleanor Krane Paucker, ‘Cinco años de misiones’, Revista de Occidente, no. 7/8 (1981), p. 252. 46 Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, Volume I. L’Invention du cinéma 1832–1897 (Paris: Denoël, 1948). 47 See Nico Baumbach, ‘Nature caught in the act: on the transformation of an idea of art in early cinema’, in Jeffrey Geiger (ed.), Cinematicity in Media History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2013), pp. 107–16. 48 See also Keathley, in Cinephilia and History, who explores this idea in relation to what he defines as the cinephiliac look. 49 Dai Vaughan, ‘Let there be Lumière’, in For Documentary: Twelve Essays (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 5 (emphasis added). 50 Patronato de las Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas, p. 50. 51 Ibid. 52 Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, p. 203. 53 See, in this regard, Val del Omar, ‘Un muchacho español logra dos inventos que revolucionarán el arte del cinema’. 54 José Val del Omar, ‘Sentimiento de la pedagogía kinestésica’, in Javier Ortiz-Echagüe (ed.), Escritos de Técnica, Poética y Mística (Madrid: La Central, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Universidad de Navarra, 2010), pp. 46–49. This text contains the ideas for a talk Val del Omar gave in June 1932 before the teachers at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, the institutional body behind the missions. 55 See Sabine Hake, ‘Film, folk, class: Béla Bálazs on spectatorship’, in Irmbert Schenck, Margrit Tröhler and Yvonne Zimmermann (eds), Kino Film Zuschauer: Filmrezeption (Marburg: Schüren, 2010) pp. 158–72. 56 The painter Ramón Gaya mentions in the memoir of his work for the missions how Cossío, referring to the way they should approach the people, rejected an openly pedagogical approach: ‘I just do not want it to have any pedagogical character’. See Gaya, ‘Mi experiencia en las Misiones Pedagógicas. Con el Museo del Prado de viaje por España’, in Urtaza (ed.), Las Misiones Pedagógicas 1931–1936, p. 373. 57 José Val del Omar, ‘Sentimiento de la pedagogía kinestésica’, in Ortiz-Echagüe (ed.), Escritos de Técnica, Poética y Mística, pp. 46–49. 58 Rafael Llano has already explored this connection of García Lorcás poetics and Val del Omar in his La imagen-duende. 59 Val del Omar, ‘Sentimiento de la pedagogía kinestésica’, pp. 46–49. 60 Mendelson, Documenting Spain, p. 95. 61 Patronato de las Misiones Pedagógicas, Misiones Pedagógicas, p. 34. Other examples can be found in the documentary film Las Misiones Pedagógicas 1931–1936. 62 Matt Losada, ‘San Juan de la Cruz in Tactilvisión: the technological mysticism of José Val del Omar's Tríptico elemental de España’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, vol. 7, no. 2 (2015), pp. 101–15. 63 Ibid., p. 107. 64 Water-Mirror was shown non-commercially in Madrid and in Berlin at the film festival in June and July 1956. In Berlin’s Gloria Palast Cinema the film was screened with diaphonic sound. It was also shown in Paris (Cinéclub of the UNESCO), and at the Expo58 in Brussels (out of competition). 65 José Val del Omar, in Ortiz-Echagüe (ed.), Escritos de Técnica, Poética y Mística, p. 109. 66 José Val del Omar, ‘Sobre la diafonía’, in Ortiz-Echagüe (ed.), Escritos de Técnica, Poética y Mística, p. 112. 67 José Val del Omar, ‘Desbordamiento apanorámico de la imagen’, in Ortiz-Echagüe (ed.), Escritos de Técnica, Poética y Mística, pp. 135–40. 68 In an unpublished document from the 1970s (‘Manuel Bartolomé Cossío y las Misiones Pedagógicas’), Val del Omar describes the impact these episodes had in his understanding of the ‘living and tactile’ art. He also connects them to his own poetics. See Ortiz-Echagüe (ed.), Escritos de Técnica, Poética y Mística, pp. 30–34. This notion of tactile participation (also mentioning the influence of the missions on Val del Omar) in an analysis of the editing of Water-Mirror of Granada is explored in Gonzalo de Lucas and Ivan Pintor Iranzo, ‘Poetics of editing in Aguaespejo Granadino: aesthetic, technical and pedagogical research into the experience of the spectator in the work of José Val del Omar’, L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos, no. 24 (2017), pp. 165–84. 69 José Val del Omar, ‘Teoría de la visión tactil’, in Ortiz-Echagüe (ed.), Escritos de Técnica, Poética y Mística, p. 113–17. The text had been originally printed in Espectáculo, no. 132, February 1959. A previous version of the text had been also presented at the VII Congresso Internazionale della Tecnica Cinematográfica in Turin, in October 1955. 70 In the documentary film Huellas de un espíritu (C. Rodríguez, 1998), min. 29. 71 For a precise analysis of the instrumentalization of the pictures that during the 1930s already include their use in the communist press or in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair 1937, see Mendelson Documenting Spain, pp. 104–16; Ortiz-Echagüe, ‘Ver cine por primera vez’, p. 145. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - A dispositif of wonder: cinema spectatorship, pedagogy and the avant garde in 1930s Spain
JF - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjab004
DA - 2021-04-08
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-dispositif-of-wonder-cinema-spectatorship-pedagogy-and-the-avant-4h301fy3Q7
SP - 1
EP - 19
VL - 62
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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