What it means
هنر هفتم (honar-e haftom) literally means the seventh art, and is the formal, elevated term for cinema in Persian. Both words are pure Persian: هنر (honar, art or skill) and هفتم (haftom, seventh). The phrase is a calque of the French expression septième art. This designation is widely attributed to the Italian-French critic Ricciotto Canudo, who by 1923 had catalogued cinema as the seventh art after architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, and poetry. In everyday speech Iranians usually say سینما (sinema), a loanword from French. هنر هفتم is reserved for formal criticism, academic writing, and cultural journalism.
How to use it
- سینما رو هنر هفتم میدونن. (sinema ro honar-e haftom midunand.) “Cinema is considered the seventh art.”
- اون درباره هنر هفتم تخصص داره. (un darbare-ye honar-e haftom takhassos dare.) “She specializes in the seventh art.”
- هنر هفتم در ایران تاریخ غنیای داره. (honar-e haftom dar irân târikh-e ghani-i dare.) “The seventh art has a rich history in Iran.”
- این مقاله جایگاه هنر هفتم رو بررسی میکنه. (in maqale jâygâh-e honar-e haftom ro barrasi mikone.) “This article examines the place of the seventh art.”
Cultural note
Iranian cinema earned international recognition well before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, but it was directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Asghar Farhadi who brought it to global prominence in later decades. Farhadi’s film A Separation won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, the first Iranian film to do so. The term هنر هفتم appears regularly in Iranian film criticism and festival programmes as a marker of intellectual seriousness about cinema as an art form equal to older traditions.