His manifesto inspired the generation of filmmakers who followed. The French Impressionist filmmakers of the 1920s, the Soviet Montage theorists like Eisenstein, and the Italian Neorealists of the 1940s all operated under the assumption Canudo cemented: that the camera was a paintbrush, and the screen was a canvas.
Corra argued that the traditional classification of arts was dead. He proposed a new hierarchy:
This was a radical notion in 1911. The narrative feature film was barely in its infancy (D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was still four years away). Canudo wasn't writing about cinema as a storytelling industry; he was writing about it as a new way for humans to perceive reality. manifesto das sete artes pdf
At the time, film was largely considered a commercial product or a technical curiosity. Canudo was one of the first to treat it with philosophical gravity. He wrote, "The cinema is a superb, a total, a complete art." He saw it as a medium that could bypass the intellect and strike directly at the emotions, creating a new "psychological state" in the viewer.
Bruno Corra (Pseudonym of Bruno Ginanni Corradini) Date: March 11, 1912 Original Title: Manifesto of the Seven Arts His manifesto inspired the generation of filmmakers who
Before Canudo, the traditional hierarchy of the arts was rigid. It was based on an ancient taxonomy derived from Hegel and other philosophers, which recognized only six distinct forms:
O caminho para a consolidação desse termo não foi imediato. Ricciotto Canudo, que vivia em Paris e acompanhava de perto os movimentos de vanguarda, publicou inicialmente em 1911 um ensaio intitulado La Naissance d'un sixième art (O Nascimento de uma Sexta Arte). Naquela época, ele excluía a dança da sua contagem principal. He proposed a new hierarchy: This was a
If you cannot find the PDF of the original manifesto , search for "Revista ARS (USP) - O Futurismo e o Cinema" . Issue 16 of that journal contains a complete reprint of the "Manifesto das Sete Artes" in Portuguese as a facsimile.
Painting and sculpture exist in space but are frozen in time. Music and poetry exist in time but have no physical presence in space. Cinema, Canudo realized, was the great unifier. It took the visual language of painting and the rhythm of music and poetry, merging them into a new, total artwork.
The Story of the Seven Arts and How Cinema Connects Them All
Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting (the "immobile" arts).