The Story of the Seven Arts and How Cinema Connects Them All
This is how cinema captures your attention.
Ricciotto Canudo lived in Paris. He was an early Italian film theoretician who worked side by side with avant-garde writers and artists.
In 1913 he published Montjoie!, a bimonthly magazine promoting Cubism in particular. Sometime before, in his manifesto The Birth of the Sixth Art, published in 1911, Canudo argued that cinema was a new art: “A superb conciliation of the Rhythms of Space and the Rhythms of Time.”
A synthesis of the five other arts:
- Architecture
- Sculpture
- Painting
- Music
- Poetry
He saw Cinema as a ‘plastic art in motion’ and gave it the name of “the Sixth Art”. Canudo then added Dance as a precursor of the Sixth Art making cinema the seventh art.
During the early 20th century, artists and writers in Paris were living in the Impressionist wake. Many focused first on visual perception, then on reinterpreting what it meant to be moved by artistic representation.
After reading Canudo’s manifest and giving some thought about his theories exposing the birth of these Seven Arts to create new forms of expression, here’s what I gathered to understand how cinema captures our attention.
The Birth of the Seven Arts
Following Canudo’s statement of the forming of the Seven Arts, he says:
“We discovered, in fact, that two of these arts originally emerged from the human brain to allow them to fix everything ephemeral in life; in the fight against the death of the appearances and forms, enriching generations with aesthetic experience.”
They were meant to be something that would complete life, up and away from reality, proving the eternity of what humans experimented as an emotion.
That way, the first signs of emotion were created, with the capacity to irradiate over all generations, the pleasure of a life greater than life itself; of a multiple personality that everyone can recreate for themselves and above their world.
Architecture and Music immediately expressed this necessity of human beings, who were trying to retain all forces of their sentimental experience. Upon building the first cabin, dancing the first dance with slight escort of a voice to give some guidelines,
Architecture and Music had already been discovered.
Afterwards, the two of them met with that representation of living beings and things which were desired to be remembered.
Meanwhile, it was added to dance the articulated expression of its movements: words. This is how Sculpture, Painting and Poetry were invented.
Canudo states that despite Architecture being originated because of a material need in order to find protection, its individualized from other arts such as Sculpture and Painting.
Therefore, Music evolved through decades following a completely different process. It arises from a wholly spiritual need for elevation and oblivion. Though, it first appeared next to its partners: Poetry and Dance, remaining for years until its freedom as something utterly independent.
How The Cinematograph Drives These Arts
Canudo described the Cinematograph as a diffusion tool that enables the connection of the various artistic disciplines to promote a specific idea.
An idea which contains a story with a purpose to reflect life through different formats and serve as a guide for humanity.
This way, by the combination of multiple artistic representations, as Canudo expressed, by means of Architecture, Poetry or Painting, we can all experiment emotions that inspire and move us through history while we create our personal mindset and vision of the world.
Canudo writes that there are two significant elements of the Cinematograph: the symbolic and the real.
- The symbolic aspect is described by Canudo as the velocity of motion an image. Though viewers were able to see a story unfold at an unreal time and space, he believed movies permitted the viewers to truly absorb the stories presented.
- The real aspect of the Cinematograph thrives as films continue to “arouse [our] interest and wonder.” How hundreds of human decades have been projected over this ellipsis of movement their major aspirations.
Canudo believed that this scientific breakthrough created the opportunity for a humanity that “actively seeks its own show, the more meaningful representation of itself.”
Because humans have been creating images of themselves for years and years, yet these were only given motion with the advent of the Cinematograph.
-Anabel Estrella
