The Poetics and Metaphysics of Rebellion and the Art of Film

In the 1910s, Ricciotto Canudo named film, first, the sixth and then the seventh art. Badiou’s remark, written about a hundred years later, thematizes the significance of this numbering, saying that film is “one art more”. In any case, from the very beginning, film meant a revolutionary answer to the eminent question of what art is. At a time when the old answers to this question became wrong or insufficient, which professional aesthetes did not notice, film already indicated the end of the concept of art as an object of a disinterested gaze. This does not mean, emphatically, that, as an art, film does not participate in the same field as all the other six arts. One of the key themes of all art is rebellion, at least since Ancient Greek poetry and drama. Rebellion is a concept of innumerable signifiers, defined in the last instance by ideology and politics, and psychology as a genre of both.

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