Why is cinema the seventh art?

Why is cinema the seventh art?

Why is cinema the seventh art?

"The cinema is the seventh art"

This definition is due to the imagination of a well-known poet and film critic.

The name comes from the eclectic poet and film critic Ricciotto Canudo. A definition that, in the common language has become synonymous with 'cinema'. Canudo, born in Gioia del Colle in 1877, moved to Paris in 1902 where he attended the avant-garde artistic and literary groups, becoming a friend of the greatest painters and artists of the time. Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, George Braque, and others.

The seven arts

Participating in the cultural debate, in 1921 he published the manifesto The Birth of the Seventh Art in which he described cinema as "a new means of the expression", "image workshop" and "light writing", a synthesis of the arts of space and time. The definition of Canudo draws on the conventional classification by which the arts were - and still are - indicated in the following order:

1. Architecture (the art of building a shelter);

2.Music (primitive art, originally composed only of voice and percussion);

3. Painting (declination of Architecture);

4. Sculpture (declination of Architecture);

5. Poetry (declination of Music);

6. Dance (music variation).

To these Canudo added, in seventh place, cinema as a means that encloses and reconciles the other arts. This classification, however, takes no account of the mythological tradition, in which the Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory), represented the supreme ideal of art and science. Nine in all, in the passage of Hesiod's Theogony their names, are linked to an artistic expression in the following way: Clico, the one who makes history famous; Euterpe, the one who cheers up the lyric poetry; Talia, the one who is festive, the comedy; Melpomene, the one who provokes desire, love poetry; Polymnia, the one who has many hymns, the mime; Urania, the one who is heavenly, astronomy; Calliope, the one who has a beautiful voice, epic poetry. Following the mythological classification, therefore, cinema would have been the tenth art.

Auguste and Luis Lumiere is considered the first filmmakers of history and the inventors of the film projector. The first paid show was held in Paris on December 28, 1895. I Lumiere, paradoxically, was convinced that cinema was an invention with no future and soon they devoted themselves to color photography.

From the 1920s to the end of the 1950s, American cinema experienced an extraordinary season that is commonly known as 'classic Hollywood cinema'.Prestigious production companies, such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers, Paramount, 20th Century Fox has exercised absolute control over their films, from production to distribution in cinemas.