Film as Art: The Debate over Cinema's Aesthetic Status

When cinema emerged as a public spectacle in the mid-1890s — the Lumière brothers held their first paid public screening at the Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895, while Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope parlors had already opened in the United States in 1894 — it was widely treated as a technological fairground novelty rather than an art, much as photography itself, following Louis Daguerre's 1839 process, had spent decades fighting for artistic legitimacy against the charge of being mere mechanical reproduction. Against this skepticism, the Italian-born critic Ricciotto Canudo, active in Paris, published a manifesto in 1911 proclaiming cinema the "sixth art," synthesizing the plastic "arts of space" (architecture, sculpture, painting) with the rhythmic "arts of time" (music, dance, poetry); once revised in 1923 as "The Manifesto of the Seven Arts" to restore architecture as a separate category, cinema became canonically the "seventh art," a label — le septième art — still current in French film criticism today. This francophone advocacy coexisted with persistent derision: the Lumières themselves are reported to have judged their invention "without any future" beyond scientific curiosity, and the working-class nickelodeon culture that sustained early studios such as Biograph reinforced cinema's low cultural standing well into the 1910s.