PART ONE 1907-1914
lutely false. However, all that was only necessary [behind the scenes] in order
to provide the public with the complete illusion of reality.4
VICTORIN) ASSET ( 1862-1913) was a prodigious scage manager (parcicularly ac che Hippodrome),
sec designer, costumer, and wricer who worked for Gaumonc becween 1905 and
1907 and chen was hired as head producer-direccor ac Eclair, where he became best known
for his dececcive and criminal series films-for example, Nick Carter, Zigomar, and Protea.
' Somecime becween 1908 and 1911, L'Assassinat du Duede Guise became La Mort du.Due
de Guise. When Pache re-released che film before and chen again during che war, ic carried
che laccer cide.
' Wichin a year afcerche release ofL'Assassinat du Due de Guise, Film d'Arc was in crouble
financially, and dramacisc Paul Gavaulc cook concrol of ics film produccion. By lace 1911,
Film d'Arc was scill heavily in debc and was caken over by Charles Delac, che owner ofMonofilm,
a small film discribucion company. See Georges Sadoul, Histoire ginirale du cinema,
vol. 3 (Paris: Denoel, 1951), 33-34.
' This was che Sociece cinemacographique des auceurs ec gens de lemes (SCAGL), founded
by che popular novelise, Pierre Decourcelle (1856-1926), and his financial collaboracor, Eugene
Gugenheim. SCAGL operaced as a subsidiary of Pache-Freres, and Alben Capellani was
ics arciscic direccor and chief filmmaker.
• Jassec was one of che firsc French wricers co give some accencion co a specifically filmic
syscem of represencacion and narracive concinuicy. Thac he focused on an American syscem
chen in vogue acknowledged a dominance chac would be well escablished by che end of the
decade.
RICCIOTTO CANU DO, "The Birth ofa Sixth Art" •
Translaced by Ben Gibson, Don Ranvaud, Sergio Sokoca, and Deborah Young from "Naissance
d'un sixieme arc," Les Entretiens idealistes (25 Occober 1911), reprinced as "L'Eschecique
du sepcieme arc," in Canudo, L'Usineaux images (Paris: Ecienne Chiron, 1926), 13-
26. The cranslacion firsc appeared in Framework 13 (Aucumn 1980), 3-7. Reprinced, wich
minor changes, by permission of che publisher.
I.
IT IS SURPRISING to find how everyone has, either by fate or some
universal telepathy, the same aesthetic conception ofthe natural environment.
From the most ancient people of che east to those more recently discovered
by our geographical heroes, we can find in all peoples the same
manifestations of the aesthetic sense; Music, with its complimentary [sic]
art, Poetry; and Agriculture, with its own two compliments [sic], Sculpture
and Painting. The whole aesthetic life of the world developed itselfin
these five expressions ofArt. Assuredly, a sixth artistic manifestation seems
co us now absurd and even unthinkable; for thousands of years, in face, no
people have been capable ofconceiving ic. Bue we are witnessing the birth
of such a sixth arc. This statement, made in a twilight hour such as chis,
still ill-defined and uncertain like all eras of transition, is repugnant to our
scientific mentality. We are living between two twilights: the eve of one
world, and the dawn of another. Twilight is vague, all outlines are con-
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fused; only eyes sharpened by a will to discover the primal and invisible
signs of things and beings can find a bearing through the misty vision of
the anima mundi. However, the sixth art imposes itselfon the unquiet and
scrutinous spirit. It will be a superb conciliation of the Rhythms of Space
(the Plastic Arts) and the Rhythms ofTime (Music and Poetry).
II.
The theater has so far best realized such a conciliation, but in an ephemeral
manner because the plastic characteristics of the theater are identified
with those of the actors, and consequently are always different. The new
manifestation of Art should really be more precisely a Painting anda Sculpture
developing in Time, as in music and poetry, which realise themselves by
transforming air into rhythm for the duration of their execution.
The cinematograph, so vulgar in name, points the way. A man of genius,
who by definition is a miracle just as beauty is an unexpected surprise,
will perform this task of mediation which at present seems to us barely
imaginable. He will find the ways, hitherto inconceivable, ofan art which
will appear for yet a long time marvelous and grotesque. He is the unknown
individual who tomorrow will induce the powerful current ofa new
aesthetic function, whence, in a most astonishing apotheosis, the Plastic
Art in Motion will arise.
III.
The cinematograph is composed ofsignificant elements "representative"
in the sense used by Emerson rather than the theatrical sense of the term,
which are already classifiable.
There are two aspects of it: the symbolic and the real, both absolutely
modern; that is to say only possible in our era, composed ofcertain essential
elements of modern spirit and energy.
The symbolic aspect is that of velocity. Velocity possesses the potential for
a great series ofcombinations, ofinterlocking activities, combining to create
a spectacle that is a series ofvisions and images tied together in a vibrant
agglomeration, similar to a living organism. This spectacle is produced exactly
by the excess of movement to be found in film, those mysterious reels
impressed by life itself. The reels of the engraved celluloid unroll in front
ofand within the beam oflight so rapidly that the presentation lasts for the
shortest possible time. No theater could offer half the changes of set and
location provided by the cinematograph with such vertiginous rapidity,
even ifequipped with the most extraordinarily modern machinery.
Yet more than the motion of images and the speed of representation,
what is truly symbolic in relation to velocity are the actions of the characters.
We see the most tumultuous, the most inverisimilitudinous scenes
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PART ONE 1907-1914
unfolding with a speed that appears impossible in real life. This precipitation
of movement is regulated with such mathematical and mechanical
precision that it would satisfy the most fanatical runner. Our age has destroyed
most earnestly, with a thousand extremely complex means, the
love of restfulness, symbolized by the smoking ofa patriarchal pipe at the
domestic hearth. Who is still able to enjoy a pipe by the fire in peace these
days, without listening to the jarring noise ofcars, animating outside, day
and night, in every way, an irresistible desire for spaces to conquer? The
cinematograph can satisfy the most impatient racer. The motorist who has
just finished the craziest of races and becomes a spectator at one of these
shows will certainly not feel a sense of slowness; images of life will flicker
in front of him with the speed of the distances covered. The cinematograph,
moreover, will present to him the farthest countries, the most unknown
people, the least known of human customs, moving, shaking,
throbbing before the spectator transported by the extreme rapidity of the
representation. Here is the second symbol ofmodern life constituted by the
cinematograph, an "instructive" symbol found in its rudimentary state in
the display of"freaks" at the old fairgrounds. It is the symbolic destruction
of distances by the immediate connaissance of the most diverse countries,
similar to the real destruction of distances performed for a hundred years
•now by monsters ofsteel.
The realaspect ofthe cinematograph is made up ofelements which arouse
the interest and wonder of the modern audience. It is increasingly evident
that present day humanity actively seeks its own show, the most meaningful
representation of its self. The theater of perennial adultery, the sole
theme of the bourgeois stage, is at last being disdained, and there is a
movement towards a theater of new, profoundly modern Poets; the rebirth
ofTragedy is heralded in numerous confused open-air spectacles representing
disordered, incoherent, but intensely willed effort. Suddenly, the cinematograph
has become popular, summing up at once all the values of a
still eminently scientific age, entrusted to Calculus rather than to the operations
ofFantasy (Fantasia), and has imposed itself in a peculiar way as a
new kind of theater, a scientific theater built with precise calculations, a
mechanical mode of expression. Restless humanity has welcomed it with
joy. It is precisely this theater ofplastic Art in motion which seems to have
brought us the rich promise of the Festival which has been longed for unconsciously,
the ultimate evolution of the ancient Festival taking place in
the temples, the theaters, the fairgrounds of each generation. 1 The thesis
ofa plastic Art in motion has recreated the Festival. It has created it scientifically
rather than aesthetically, and for this reason it is succeeding in this
age, although fatally and irresistibly moving towards the attainment of
Aesthetics..
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V.
I move on now to a great aesthetic problem, which must be emphasized.
Art has always been essentially a stylization oflife into stillness; the better
an artist has been able to express the greater number of "typical" conditions,
that is, the synthetic and immutable states ofsouls and forms, the
greater the recognition he has attained. The cinematograph, on the contrary,
achieves the greatest mobility in the representation of life. The
thought that it might open the unsuspected horizon ofa new art different
from all pre-existing manifestations cannot fail to appeal to an emancipated
mind, free from all traditions and constraints. The ancient painters and engravers
of prehistoric caves who reproduced on reindeer bones the contracted
movements of a galloping horse, of the artists who sculpted cavalcades
on the Parthenon friezes, also developed the device of stylizing
certain aspects oflife in clear, incisive movements. But the cinematograph
does not merely reproduce one aspect; it represents the whole of life in action,
and in such action that, even when the succession of its characteristic
events unravel slowly, in life, it is developed with as much speed as possi-
ble.
In this way cinematography heightens the basic psychic condition of
western life which manifests itself in action, just as eastern life manifests
itselfin contemplation. The whole history ofwestern life reaches to people
in the dynamism characteristic of our age, while the whole of humanity
rejoices, having found again its childhood in this new Festival. We could
not imagine a more complex or more precise movement. Scientific thought
with all its energy, synthesizing a thousand discoveries and inventions, has
created out of and for itself this sublime spectacle. The cinematographic
visions pass before its eyes with all the electrical vibrations oflight, and in
all the external manifestations if its inner life.
The cinematograph is thus the theater ofa new Pantomime, consecrated
Painting in motion. It constitutes the complete manifestation of a unique
creation by modern man. As the modern Pantomime, it is the new dance of
manifestations.
Now, it is necessary to ask of the cinematograph, is it to be accepted
within the confines of the arts?
It is not yet an art, because it lacks the freedom ofchoice peculiar to plastic
interpretation, conditioned as it is to being the copy ofa subject, the condition
that prevents photography from becoming an art. In executing the
design of a tree on a canvas, the painter expresses without any doubt, unconsciously
and in a particular and clear configuration, his global interpretation
of the vegetative soul, that is of all the conceptual elements deposited
deep in his creative spirit by an examination ofall the trees he has seen
in his life; as Poe said, with the "eyes ofdream." With that particular form
PART ONE 1907-1914
he synthesizes corresponding souls and his art, I repeat, will gain in intensity
in proportion to the artist's skill in immobilizing the essence of things
and their universal meanings in a particular and clear configuration.
Whoever contented himself with copying the outlines, with imitating the
colors ofa subject, would be a poor painter; the great artist extends a fragment
of his cosmic soul in the representation ofa plastic form.
Arts are the greater the less they imitate and the more they evoke by means
ofa synthesis. A photographer, on the other hand, does not have the faculty
of choice and elaboration fundamental to Aesthetics; he can only put together
the forms he wishes to reproduce, which he really is not reproducing,
limiting himself to cutting out images with the aid of the luminous
mechanism of a lens and a chemical composition. The cinematograph,
therefore, cannot today be an art. But for several reasons, the cinematographic
theater is the first abode of the new art-an art which we can just
barely conceive. Can this abode become a "temple" for aesthetics?
A desire for an aesthetic organization drives entrepreneurs towards certain
kinds ofresearch. In an age lacking in imagination, such as ours, when
an excess of documentation is everywhere, weakening artistic creativity,
and patience games are triumphing over expressions of creative talent, the
cinematograph offers the paroxysm of the spectacle: objective life repre- •
sented in a wholly exterior manner, on the one hand with rapid miming,
on the other with documentaries. The great fables of the past are retold,
mimed by ad hoc actors chosen from the most important stars. What is
shown above all is the appearance rather than the essence of contemporary
life, from sardine fishing in the Mediterranean to the marvel of flying steel
and the indomitable human courage of the races at Dieppe or the aviation
week at Rheims.
But the entertainment makers are already experimenting with other
things. It is their aim that this new mimetic representation of "total life"
take ever deeper root, and Gabrielle D'Annunzio has dreamed up a great
Italian heroic pantomime for the cinematograph.2 It is well known that
there exist in Paris societies which organize a kind of "trust" for cinematographic
spectacles among writers. Hitherto the theater has offered writers
the best chance of becoming rich quickly; but the cinematograph requires
less work and offers better returns. At this moment hundreds of
talent~d people, attracted by the promise of immediate and universal success,
are concentrating their energies towards the creation of the modern
Pantomime. And it will come out of their strenuous efforts and from the
probable genius of one of them. The day such work is given to the world
will mark the birthday ofa wholly new art.
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VI.
The cinematograph is not only the perfect outcome of the achievements
of modern science, which it summarizes wonderfully. It also represents, in
a disconcerting but important way, the most recent product of contemporary
theater. It is not the exaggeration of a principle, but its most logical
and ultimate development. The "bourgeois" dramatics, like all ofour playwrights,
should spontaneously acknowledge the cinematograph as their
most discreet representative, and should in consequence ready themselves
for its support by making use ofit, because the so-called psychological, social
drama, etc. , is nothing but a degeneration of the original comic theater,
counterposed with the tragic theater of fantasy and spiritual ennoblement,
the theater ofAristophanes and Plautus. Vitruvius, describing as an
architect the many different sets used in ancient performances, talks about
the solemnity ofcolumns and temples ofthe tragic theater, about the wood
of the satyric theater, and about sylvan adventures and the houses of the
middle classes where the commedias took place. The latter were but the representation
of daily life in its psychological and social aspects, that is, of
customs and characteristics..
VII.
The cinematograph, on the other hand, adds to this type of theater the
element of absolutely accurate speed, in this way inducing a new kind of
pleasure that the spectator discovers in the extreme precision of the spectacle.
In fact, none of the actors moving on the illusory stage will betray
his part, nor would the mathematical development of the action lag for a
fraction of a second. All movement is regulated with clockwork precision.
The scenic illusion is therefore less engaging, in a sense less physical, but
terribly absorbing. And this life, regulated as if by clockwork, makes one
think ofthe triumph ofmodern scientific principle as a new Alviman, master
of the mechanics of the world in Manichean doctrine.
The rapid communion of vital energies between the two opposite poles
of the very touching and the very comical produces in the spectator a sense of
relaxation. Everything which in real life presents itself as an obstacle, the
inevitable slowness of movements and actions in space, is as if suppressed
in the cinematograph. Moreover, the very comical soothes the mind, lightening
existence of the weight of the somber social cape, imposed by the
thousand conventions of the community and representing all kinds ofhierarchies.
The comic can suppress hierarchies, it can join together the most
different beings, give an extraordinary impression of the mixture of the
most separate universes, which in real life are irreducibly distinct from one
another. Since the comic is essentially irreverent, it gives a deep sense of
PART ONE 1907-1914
relief to individuals oppressed in every moment of their real lives by social
discriminations, so emphatically present. This sense of relief is one of the
factors ofthat nervous motion ofcontraction and expansion called laughter.
Life is simplifiedby the grotesque which is nothing other than a deformation
per excessum or per defectum of the established forms. The grotesque, at least
in this sense, relieves life of its inescapable grimness and releases it into
laughter.
Caricature is based on the display and masterful combination ofthe most
miminal facets of the human soul, its weak spots, which gush forth from
the irony of social life, which is itself, after all, somewhat ironical and insane.
With irony, in the convulsive motion of laughter, caricature provokes
in man this feeling of extreme lightness, because irony throws over
its raised shoulders Zarathustra's "dancing and laughing" cape of many
colors.'
The ancients were able to perceive in irony the roots of Tragedy. They
crowned their tragic spectacles in laughter, in the farce. Conversely, we
precede rather than follow the dramatic spectacle with Farce, immediately
upon the raising of the curtain, because we have forgotten the significance
ofsome of the truths discovered by our forebears. Yet the need for an ironic
spectacle persists. And the Farce of the Orestes Tetrology of Aeschylus, th~
Farce which could not be found, must have been originally immensely rich
in humor to have been able to lighten the spirit of the elegant Athenian
women oppressed by the sacred terror ofCassandra. Now I do not know of
anything more superbly grotesque than the antics of film comics. People
appear in such an extravagant manner that no magician could pull anything
like them out ofa hat; movements and vision change so rapidly that
no man offlesh and blood could present so many to his fellows, without the
help of that stunning mixture ofchemistry and mechanics, that extraordinary
creator of emotions that is the cinematograph. A new comic type is
thus created. He is the man of blunders and metamorphoses who can be
squashed under a wardrobe of mirrors, or fall head-first breaking through
all four floors ofa four-story building, only to climb up out of the chimney
to reappear on the roof in the guise ofa genuine snake.
The complexity of this new kind ofspectacle is surprising. The whole of
human activity throughout the centuries had contributed to its composition.
When artists of genius bestow rhythms of Thought and Art on this
spectacle, the new Aesthetics will show the cinematographic theater some
of its most significant aspects.
In fact the cinematographic theater is the first new theater, the first authentic
and fundamental theater of our time. When it becomes truly aesthetic,
complemented with a worthy musical score played by a good orchestra,
even if only representing life, real life, momentarily fixed by the
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photographic lens, we shall be able to feel then our first sacred emotion, we
shall have a glimpse of the spirits, moving towards a vision of the temple,
where Theater and Museum will once more be restored for a new religious
communion of the spectacle and Aesthetics. The cinematograph as it is today
will evoke for the historians of the future the image of the first extremely
rudimentary wooden theaters, where goats have their throats
slashed and the primitive "goat song" and "tragedy" were danced, before
the stone apotheosis consecrated by Lycurgus, even before Aeschylus'
birth, to the Dionysian theater.
The modern public possess an admirable power of "abstraction" since it
can enjoy some of the most absolute abstractions in life. In the Olympia,
for instance, it was possible to see the spectators fanatically applauding a
phonograph placed on the stage and adorned with flowers whose shining
copper trumpet had just finished playing a love duet.... The machine
was triumphant, the public applauded the ghostly sound of far away or
even dead actors. It is with such an attitude that the public go to the cinematographic
theater. Moreover, the cinematograph brings, in the midst
ofeven the smallest human settlement, the spectacle ofdistant, enjoyable,
moving or instructive things: it spreads culture and stimulates everywhere
the eternal desire for the representation oflife in its totality.
On the walls of the cinematographic theater at times one can see inscriptions
commemorating the latest achievements of this prodigious invention
which accelerates our knowledge of universal events and reproduces everywhere
life and the experience oflife since 1830 to the present day. Among
the latest heroes are Renault, Edison, Lumiere, the Pathe brothers....
But what is striking, characteristic, and significant, even more than the
spectacle itself, is the uniform will of the spectators, who belong to all social
classes, from the lowest and least educated to the most intellectual.
It is desire for a new Festival, for a new joyous unanimity, realized at a
show, in a place where together, all men can forget in greater or lesser
measure, their isolated individuality. This forgetting, soul of any religion
and spirit of any aesthetic, will one day be superbly triumphant. And the
Theater, which still holds the vague promise ofsomething never dreamt of
in previous ages: the creation ofa sixth art, the plastic Art in motion, having
already achieved the rudimentary form of the modern pantomime.
Present day life lends itself to such victory....
R1CCIOTTO CANUDO (187sr1923) was an Italian expatriate who settled in Paris in 1902
as a scholar, writer, and literary entrepreneur. A friend of Apollinaire and D'Annunzio, he
established a movement called Cerebrism, edited a "French imperialist" art journal called
Montjoie! (1913-1914), and hosted a circle of intellectuals and artists interested in the cinema
who met regularly at the Cafe Napolitain.
' Canudo's concept of the Festival seems to come out ofancient Greek culture rather than
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out of the European Medieval period or Renaissance. It is a mark ofCanudo's contradictory
interests or his ambition to synthesize widely divergent ways ofchinking that, on the same
page, he can bring together ancient Greek cheater and Italian Futurism or a classical literary
tradition and a potential new art form, the cinema.
2 Gabriel D'Annunzio (1863-1938) never wrote any scenarios for the cinema during this
period. Some of his works were adapted by ochers, including his son, Gabriellino D'Annunzio,
before the war; and his name was attached to Pastrone's Cabiria (1913), but only
for publicity reasons.
' The reference co Zarachustra as well as the "birch of tragedy" suggests how fashionable
Nietzsche had become in France after the first translations of his work in 1900.
ABEL GANCE, "A Sixth Art"
From "Un sixieme art," Cine-journal 185 (9 March 1912), 10.
THE CINEMA? No, as my friend Canudo says, it is a sixth art that has
yet to advance beyond its first stammerings.
A sixth art which, at this moment, just like French tragedy in the time
of {Alexandre} Hardy {1540-1632}, awaits its Corneille, its classic in a
word, in order to lay down its true foundations.
A sixth art, glittering with movement, diverse objects, and peaceful
landscapes. Here we can take each ofthe tableaux ofthe best theaters, make
the characters descend from their frames, live as their creators imagined•
them, then return them to their immortal poses-now known to everyone.
A sixth art where the wings of the Victory ofSamothrace actually quiver
and the huntress Diana can escape through the thicket imagined by Uean}
Goujon {1514-1569}. ...
A sixth art where we can evoke in minutes all the great disasters of history
and extract from them an immediate objective lesson.
A sixth art which, with one and the same sadness, will bring tears to the
eyes of the Arab and the Eskimo, simultaneously, and which, at the same
time, will offer them the same lesson in courage and health.
A sixth art which, one day when some inspfred artist will consider it
more than a simple amusement, will spread its faith throughout the world
more fully than the theater or the book. '
At the cinema, the knitted brow, the tears, the laughter are so close to
the spectator that it is impossible not to be moved; on the face ofJuliet
dying can we not read there several of great Will's lines, and in Dante's
dream several stanzas from The Divine Comedy?
Let the cinema be naturally grandiose and human instead of what the
popular novels of the past fifty years have been to literature. Let it be innovative
instead of following either a maudlin sentimentality or the mechanical
comic film which seems in fashion, because the true way has yet
to be mapped out. Let it not be theatrical especially, but allegorical, sym-
66