Essential to the poetics of revision in high literary modernism is assessing what should stay and what should be left out, and the effects of such alterations. When cinema had solidified as an influential mass art by 1930, Spanish modernist Ramón Gómez de la Serna published a film script in which he bases each sequence on his earlier short fiction collections. I argue that Gómez de la Serna adopts cinematic narrative techniques in order to experiment with a visual mode of expression that he did not view as a new, “Seventh Art,” but rather as a distinct way of producing art, what he considered was the séptimo procedimiento, or the 'seventh method.' With his recognition of cinema’s potential to alter the written word and reinvigorate literary expression, I contend that these re-visions advance the script's overarching theme of witnessing violence and serve as a vehicle through which to engage in a social critique of filmic spectatorship and, more generally, our forms of observing, and engaging with, the world. Ultimately, I read such re-visions not as an instance of adaptation or intermediality, but rather as a site of creative regeneration that interrogates practices of repetition (modification of content) and re-presentation (alteration of the manner in which that content is conveyed).
