seventh art

English

Etymology

Calque of French septième art, which was coined by Italian film theoretician Ricciotto Canudo around 1921[1] considering filmmaking to be a new art combining the six previous arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, dance. Canudo previously used the term sixième art (literally “sixth art”) around 1911 when he did not include dance in the set of preceding arts.

Noun

the seventh art

  1. (film) The making of motion pictures; filmmaking.
    • 1948, Jacques Queval, "Three French Histories of Film" (book reviews), Hollywood Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4, p. 454,
      Georges Charensol's Panorama du cinema, originally published in 1927, . . . was the bible of devotees of the seventh art.
    • 2004, Barry Keith Grant, "Diversity or Dilution? Thoughts on Film Studies and the SCMS," Cinema Journal, vol. 43, no. 3, p. 90,
      Because of the inherent interdisciplinarity of studying film—once called, appositely, the "seventh art"—film studies was among the first disciplines to embrace such theories and methodologies as feminism, semiotics, and structuralism.
    • 2008, Richard Corliss and Mary Corliss, "Can Cannes Still Do It?," Time, 14 May,
      Cannes is the world's largest annual convention, and a yearly thermometer for the temperature of the seventh art.

References
  1. “Collection of Periodical Titles”, in Ciné-Ressources‎ (in French), La Cinémathèque française, n.d., retrieved 2021-06-25: “En avril 1921, Ricciotto Canudo, celui que Jean Epstein appelle "le missionnaire de la poésie au cinéma", fonde Le Club des amis du septième art […] ”
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