Ricciotto Canudo

Ricciotto Canudo (French: [kanydo]; 2 January 1877 – 10 November 1923) was an early Italian film theoretician who lived primarily in France. In 1913, he published a bimonthly avant-garde magazine entitled Montjoie!, promoting Cubism in particular. Involved in numerous movements yet confined to none, Canudo exuded seemingly boundless energy. He ventured into poetry, penned novels (pioneering a style emphasizing interpersonal psychology, which he dubbed sinestismo), and established open-air theatre in southern France. As an art critic, he unearthed talents like Marc Chagall, curating a Chagall exhibition in 1914. In that same year, alongside Blaise Cendrars, he issued a call for foreigners residing in France to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. Among the 80,000 who responded was Canudo himself, who served until being discharged due to injury in 1918. He saw cinema as "plastic art in motion", and gave cinema the label "the Sixth Art", later changed to "the Seventh Art", still current in French, Italian, and Spanish conceptions of art, among others. Canudo subsequently added dance as a precursor to the sixth—a third rhythmic art with music and poetry—making cinema the seventh art. Canudo is often regarded as the inaugural aesthetician of cinema, thus making his "Manifesto" pertinent for an English-speaking readership. Several of Canudo's concepts found resonance with two prominent early French film experimenters—Jean Epstein and Abel Gance.

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