This article takes the career of Spanish filmmaker Val del Omar (1904–1982) as a basis for analysing some of the crossroads between the psychologisation of modern culture and the development of cinematic art. Like Sergei Eisenstein or Jean Epstein, Val del Omar was an avant-garde director who resorted to psychological discourse to substantiate his aesthetic theories and proposals. As his creative life spanned the better part of the 20th century, he was able to absorb many psychological premises into his theses, including theories around ethno-psychology, psychoanalysis, perception, and empathy. As our analysis shows, those premises drove his aesthetic experimentation to limits beyond conventional cinema. More specifically, Val del Omar’s heterodoxic theoretical and cinematic output focused on two features of psychology he deemed inherent to the new audiovisual media: perceptive automatism and the empathetic connection with the sublime. Building on those grounds, Val del Omar aimed to spur the development of freely willed individuals-viewers. Our conclusions stress the continuity between his psycho-aesthetic agenda and the social engineering characteristic of Western modernity, in conjunction with the construction, not wholly free of contradiction, of the model of subjectivity requisite to that endeavour.
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