Friday Minute
No. 26 | February 5, 2010

Parlez-Vous Cinéma?

Our theme this week
Film terms from the French

Featured this week
Monday         —   Mise-en-Scène
Tuesday         —   Montage
Wednesday    —   Cinéma Vérité
Thursday        —   Auteur

Le septième art

Pronounced, lə-sĕ-’tyĕm-aʁ
Literally, the seventh art

The essentials
Le septième art is, in a word, cinema.

The origin of the term is French, though among speakers of English you’ll probably hear it in translated form, “the seventh art.”  In any language, you’re still more likely to hear the term in a Paris café than a Hollywood boardroom.  The French like to think of film as art.  Americans, not so much.

The term goes back to a time long before Cahiers du Cinéma.  It was coined by Ricciotto Canudo, an Italian-born writer who lived primarily in France.  In 1911 he published a manifesto arguing the cinema was indeed a new art.  The title of his work (as translated) was The Birth of the Sixth Art.  Canudo was borrowing from the ideas of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose Lectures on Asthetics was published posthumously in 1835.  Hegel’s work was highly influential.  Among other things, it examined what Hegel regarded as the five major art forms, namely:  architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry.

How did “sixth” become “seventh”?  Canudo later added dance to Hegel’s list.  In 1920 he started a magazine called “Le Gazette de Sept Arts.”  His best-known essay was “Reflections on the Seventh Art,” published in 1923.

Beyond the final credits
Canudo was not the last to come up with a new epithet for cinema.  The French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau liked the term  “la dixième Muse” (the tenth Muse), but that one never quite caught on.  (Perhaps there’s a certain art to coining new names.)

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Immortal Beloved (1994)
“Ode to Joy”

The seventh art takes a look at one of the first six.

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MAD Announcement:
The answers to the puzzles in the MAD Launch Contest are now available.  You can find them here.  Thanks for playing!

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Quote of Note
Jules:  “Do you know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in France?
Brett:  “No.”
Jules:  “Tell him, Vincent.”
Vincent:  “Royale with cheese.”
Jules:  “Royale with cheese.  Do you know why they call it a Royale with cheese?”
Brett:  “Because of the metric system?”
Jules:  “Check out the big brain on Brett.”
—Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), Brett (Frank Whaley), Vincent Vega (John Travolta), Pulp Fiction (1993)

…58…59…60.