Cinema is known as the seventh art, but this does not imply that there is a hierarchy of arts. There have been different ways of cataloging them throughout history. In the 18th century, the French philosopher Charles Batteaux developed a theory of fine arts, a term in which he included painting, sculpture, music, poetry and dance. He also considered architecture art and later added eloquence.
Different authors modified this list. The work Lessons on Aesthetics, by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the 19th century, distinguished three artistic forms: the symbolic one was related to architecture, the classical one was related to sculpture, and the romantic one was related to painting, music and poetry. .
It is considered that the birth of cinema took place on December 28, 1895, the date on which the first films made by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière were screened in Paris. The person who added this discipline to the list of arts was Ricciotto Canudo, Italian film critic and playwright. In his Manifesto of the Seven Arts, published at the beginning of the 20th century, he called cinema the seventh art.
This text gave rise to a classification of the arts that was universally accepted and is still valid today: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry or literature, dance and cinema. That the latter is the seventh art does not mean that the other six disciplines are identified with an order, so there is no first art, second art, third art, fourth art, fifth art or sixth art.
Canudo explained in his text the origin and evolution of the classical arts, and then highlighted: “We have married science with art, I mean, the discoveries and unknowns of science with the ideal of art, applying the former to last to capture and fix the rhythms of light. It is cinema. The seventh art reconciles all the others in this way.”