Ricciotto Canudo

Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) was an Italian film theoretician. In his manifesto The Birth of the Sixth Art, published as early as 1911, he argued that the cinema synthetized the spatial arts (architecture, sculpture and painting) with the temporal arts (music and dance). He later added poetry in his 1923 better-known manifesto Reflections on the Seventh Art (which went through a number of earlier drafts, all published in Italy or France). He is therefore considered to be the very first theoretician of cinema. He saw cinema as "plastic art in motion".

Canudo lived primarily in France. A collection of his essays L'usine aux images appeared in Paris in 1927.

Other Writings

• La ville sans chef, Paris 1910
• Music as a religion of the future, London 1913

Controversy

It has been documented that Canudo sympathised with Nazis. However, considering that he died in 1923, when Nazism was in its early stages (Mein Kampf had not yet been published and the German Nazi party would not form a government for a further 10 years), care should be taken in associating Canudo with how we understand the Nazi movement today. Many reasonable people, particularly those affected by the carnage of World War I, had sympathies with the aims of early Nazism. Those sympathies often vanished with appreciation of the movement's excesses, aggressivity and level of intolerance.

References

• The Visual Turn, Angela Dalle Vacche (Editor), Rutgers University Press, (2002), ISBN 0-8135-3173-X
• The European Cinema Reader, Catherine Fowler (Editor), Routledge (UK), (2002), ISBN 0-415-24091-3
• An Introduction to Framework by Paul Willemen [1]

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