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The phrase "seventh art" sounds as if someone once compiled an official list of all forms of creativity and assigned cinema the seventh place. In reality, this numbering was neither an ancient tradition nor a universally recognized classification. It emerged in the early 20th century thanks to film theorist Ricciotto Canudo.
It was Canudo who proposed to consider cinema as a new art form capable of combining the possibilities of all previous ones. His concept did not become a universal scientific system, but the phrase turned out to be remarkably apt. Today, "seventh art" is used as a figurative name for cinema, often without even thinking about where it comes from and what was then considered the first six arts.
Who called cinema the seventh art
Ricciotto Canudo was an Italian writer, critic, and theorist who lived and worked mainly in Paris. He belonged to a generation of intellectuals who observed the birth of cinema and tried to understand its place among other forms of creativity.
At the beginning of the 20th century, cinema did not yet have an unquestionable status as an art. The first films were short, often built around simple spectacles or tricks, and primarily demonstrated to the contemporary audience the astonishing ability to capture movement. Cinema was perceived as a technical invention, a fairground attraction, or a form of mass entertainment, but it was not always placed on the same level as music, literature, or painting.
Canudo was one of the first to consistently argue that cinema has its own artistic language. In 1911, he published the text "The Birth of the Sixth Art," in which he called cinema a combination of spatial and temporal arts.
To the spatial arts, the theorist classified architecture, sculpture, and painting. They create forms that exist in space. To the temporal arts — music and poetry, as their perception unfolds in time. Cinema could work with image, movement, rhythm, space, music, and word simultaneously, which is why Canudo saw it as a synthesis of different ways of artistic expression.
Initially, cinema in this system was the sixth art. Later, Canudo added dance to the list, after which cinema moved to the seventh position. He developed his concept in the "Manifesto of the Seven Arts." In the 1920s, Canudo also founded a club of friends of the seventh art and published La Gazette des Sept Arts — "The Newspaper of the Seven Arts." Gradually, the new designation entered cultural circulation and became established for cinema. Canudo's role in the formation of early film studies is examined in more detail in the study French Film Theory.
What were the first six arts
In the classification related to Canudo's ideas, the arts are arranged as follows:
- Architecture — the art of creating and organizing space.
- Sculpture — the art of three-dimensional form.
- Painting — the art of representation on a plane.
- Music — the art of sound and rhythm.
- Poetry — the art of word, which today is often understood more broadly as literature.
- Dance — the art of body movement in time and space.
- Cinema — the synthesis of spatial and temporal arts.
This sequence is not a ranking. Architecture is not considered "more important" than sculpture, and music is not deemed more significant than poetry. The number assigned to cinema was primarily meant to emphasize the emergence of a new form of art that absorbed the means of already known forms.
Even the first seven positions should not be perceived as an unchanging canon. In modern versions, poetry is often replaced by the broader concept of "literature," painting is combined with graphics and other visual arts, and dance is associated with theater, circus, pantomime, and performing arts in general.
Were the arts numbered before Canudo
Long before the emergence of cinema, philosophers and theorists attempted to classify different forms of creativity. However, there was no single numbered list that began with architecture and ended with cinema.
In ancient tradition, there were nine Muses, each of whom presided over a certain sphere of art or knowledge. In the Middle Ages, the concept of the seven liberal arts emerged: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. However, this was primarily an educational system rather than a classification of arts in the modern sense.
In the 18th–19th centuries, philosophers compared architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, trying to explain how each of these forms works with material, image, space, and time. Canudo relied on this tradition but did not simply repeat an existing ancient list. He restructured previous ideas to find a place for cinema within them.
Therefore, the widespread assertion that the seven arts were numbered in antiquity is incorrect. The familiar system with cinema in the seventh position was formed only in the early 20th century.
What are considered the eighth, ninth, and tenth arts
After the phrase "seventh art" became popular, the list began to be extended. However, the new numbers no longer had a single author or universally recognized order.
In modern Francophone culture, the following numbering is often used:
- Eighth art — photography, radio, television, or media art
- Ninth art — comics
- Tenth art — video games or digital art
The concept of "ninth art" has become most firmly established after cinema — this term refers to comics, especially in France and Belgium. French critics in the 1960s played a significant role in popularizing this designation. In particular, in 1964, Claude Baillargeon used it regarding comics in his article, and later the phrase became part of the cultural and professional lexicon.
With the eighth number, everything is much more complicated. It has been used to refer to photography, although it emerged before cinema, as well as radio, television, or all audiovisual media combined. Because of this, in one list, television may be the eighth art, in another — photography, and in yet another — media art as a large group of creative practices.
Video games are often called tenth art, as they combine image, music, literary script, animation, acting, and interaction with the player. However, this number is also not official. In various sources, the tenth art is also referred to as digital creativity, multimedia, photography, television, and even cooking.
How many numbered arts exist in total
There is no single correct answer. The most well-known and relatively coherent remains the concept of Canudo's seven arts. In popular classifications, the list is often extended to ten, adding media art, comics, and video games. However, after the seventh position, the order becomes conditional, and different versions contradict each other.
There are also mentions of the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth art. These terms refer to digital graphics, multimedia, performance, fashion, advertising, cooking, and other forms of creativity. Usually, these are figurative designations or attempts to emphasize the cultural significance of a certain sphere, rather than parts of an official international system.
Thus, the "seventh art" is not just a beautiful synonym for cinema. This phrase preserves the memory of a time when cinema still had to prove its right to stand alongside painting, music, and literature. Canudo's theory did not create a definitive map of art, but it gave cinema a name that turned out to be much more enduring than the classification itself.
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