Hegel, Cinema, and the Other Arts

Abstract

Abstract Cinema, the seventh art, emerges sixty years after Hegel’s death. In his magnum opus on aesthetics, Hegel states that theatre, more precisely modern comedy, was the last of the arts, in the following formula: “[Modern] comedy ultimately leads to the dissolution of art.” It would seem senseless to infer, from within the Hegelian system, the emergence of a new, previously unknown art form, after modern comedy. The question is why Hegel excludes a subsequent dialectical turn, that is to say, the dissolution of this dissolution. We would then have a new figure in which art would be the total deployment of its already existing resources. There would be a figure of representation whose content would progressively accumulate the destiny of an art henceforth atemporal and in a way absolute. This art would then be the last, not because the absolute manifests itself only negatively, but, on the contrary, because the absolute would manifest itself in it as the total mobilisation of the registers of representation. This art would simultaneously be architecture, sculpture, painting, and dramatic poetry, and it would bring history of art to a halt not through the negative pirouettes of comedy but by the seriousness and anxiety combined in its redemptive totalisation. Could this total art be cinema?