Nemesio M. Sobrevila, Walter Benjamin, and the provocation of film

The philosophical and aesthetic questions explored in Nemesio M. Sobrevila's 1929 film El sexto sentido are also central to the film criticism of Walter Benjamin. This essay looks at three closely interrelated concepts which interested both men in their work: the representation of filmic space, the emergence of film as a crisis of representation, and the sociopolitical implications of the separation of the image from its referent through editing (the cut).