The Poetics of the Seventh Art

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Rain falling slowly over a silent countryside. A motionless horse outlined in the mist. A puddle reflecting a grey sky barely crossed by the wind. For the viewer, the experience may seem insignificant. And yet, that light, that imperceptible movement of the grass, that face lost in thought may remain with them long after the screening.
Some films have this particular ability to haunt us through their discreet, emotional, romantic aesthetic…
This reveals a kinship between cinema and poetry that is not merely metaphorical. Since the early days of the seventh art, critics, philosophers and filmmakers have tried to understand why certain works produce an emotion that goes beyond their narrative.
In literature, poetry is born from rhythm, images, metaphors and the silences between words. In cinema, it emerges from a camera movement, from a light that changes imperceptibly, from a shot that lasts a few seconds longer than expected.

Seeing Differently
Cinema is often presented as the art of storytelling. Scripts, twists and characters occupy a central place in the way we talk about it. We easily summarize a film by recounting its story. Yet this approach quickly reaches its limits.
How can one convey the emotion created by a ray of sunlight passing through a window? How can one explain why a simple shot of rain can sometimes move us more deeply than a spectacular scene? These questions reveal a fundamental distinction between what is told and the way it is shown.
The critic and theorist André Bazin was one of the first to defend the idea that cinema has a privileged relationship with reality. For him, the strength of the cinematographic image lies less in its ability to demonstrate than in its power of evocation.
This conception would profoundly influence several generations of filmmakers. It finds a particular echo among those who reject demonstrative editing or spectacular effects in favour of a more contemplative gaze.

When Time Becomes Matter
Perhaps this is one of the most striking characteristics of poetic cinema: it alters our perception of time.
In our daily lives, everything seems to accelerate. Information follows one piece after another without interruption. Images pass by at dizzying speed. Social media encourages instantaneity and the rapid consumption of content.
Poetic cinema takes exactly the opposite path. It slows down, giving the gaze the time it needs to encounter things. Several auteur films brilliantly illustrate this point of view. We may think of Manchester by the Sea, by Kenneth Lonergan. Nearly ten years after its release, the film has not aged, and it undoubtedly draws part of its timelessness from its slowness.
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s work, rain can last several minutes. In Yasujirō Ozu’s films, a teapot, an empty corridor or the façade of a house become moments of breathing between two scenes. Terrence Malick films grass, trees and light with an attention that seems to suspend the story itself. As for Wong Kar-wai, he transforms streets, neon lights and slow motion into fragments of memory.

The Images That Remain
In many ways, cinema and poetry are in harmony, to the great delight of lovers of the seventh art. Like a poem, a film can create a space in which several meanings coexist. Its power comes precisely from what it leaves suspended.
The philosopher Gaston Bachelard, although he did not write specifically about cinema, showed how poetic images awaken within us a deeply personal imagination. Many filmmakers seem to share this intuition. They do not film things only for what they are, but for what they awaken.

An Emotion That Escapes Words
Contemporary neuroscience sheds light on certain mechanisms linked to the emotions provoked by images. Our brain does not process an image merely as information. It simultaneously mobilizes memory, emotions, attention, bodily sensations and unconscious associations. A cinematographic image therefore acts on several levels of perception before we even begin to interpret it.
But the poetry of cinema does not reside only in our brain. It also arises from a singular encounter between a work and the person who watches it. Two viewers can contemplate exactly the same shot and discover radically different emotions within it.
Poetry resides in this part of indeterminacy. In those sequences where the director trusts the viewer’s gaze, preferring to suggest rather than explain, to make us feel rather than demonstrate.

Four Filmmakers of Poetry
If certain films resemble poems, it is because some filmmakers have chosen to move their art away from the territory of pure narrative, placing their trust in perception rather than storytelling. Andrei Tarkovsky, Yasujirō Ozu, Terrence Malick and Wong Kar-wai are considered references in this field, each allowing poetry to express itself through its own language. With Andrei Tarkovsky, this idea reaches a form of radicality. The shot is never a simple narrative fragment, but a lived duration. Rain, fire, mud and wind are not sets: they are presences. In Stalker or Nostalghia, cinema presents itself as a continuous sensory experience, hence his famous expression: “sculpting in time”.
With Yasujirō Ozu, poetry is born, on the contrary, from stillness. The actions are ordinary: a family, a teapot, an interrupted conversation. But meaning shifts elsewhere, into ellipses, fixed shots and empty spaces. The famous “pillow shots” — corridors, deserted houses, silent objects — are there to suspend time.
With Terrence Malick, poetry is interior. Voice-over blends with images like a thought coming into being. In The Tree of Life or Days of Heaven, narration dissolves in favour of a sensory experience of the living world.

The shot feels more than it represents.
Wong Kar-wai, for his part, works with memory. Movement is often slowed down, fragmented, as if held back. Corridors, neon lights and misted windows create a world of afterimages. In In the Mood for Love, the story matters less than the obsessive return of gestures, glances and absences. Here, poetry is born from repetition and from what remains unsaid.
In all of them, the same rupture can be found: the refusal of cinema as a simple narrative machine. The story is not removed, but displaced. It becomes one support among others, in the service of a broader experience.

Cinema, the Last Popular Poetic Art
If cinema maintains such a close relationship with poetry, it is also because, despite its industrial and digital transformation, it remains one of the last arts capable of reaching a wide audience while preserving a complex aesthetic dimension.
Literary poetry has gradually withdrawn from the popular sphere. It has specialized, sometimes closing in on itself, within restricted editorial spaces. Cinema, meanwhile, has maintained massive exposure. It is seen, shared and discussed on a large scale.
Of course, many works do not fall into the category of the “poetic”. There are strongly narrative films, structured by the codes of classical screenwriting. From this perspective, the question of what we seek in images remains more relevant than ever.

The answer may not lie in an opposition between narrative and poetry, but in their coexistence. Ultimately, what holds these “film-poems” together is not the absence of story, but the presence of a remainder. Something that exceeds immediate meaning. An image that continues to work within us after the film has ended.
And it is there that cinema definitively joins poetry: in what remains after the screening.

References
Remes, J. (2020). Absence in cinema: The art of showing nothing. Columbia University Press.
Rascaroli, L., & Murphy, J. (Eds.). (2020). Theorizing film through contemporary art: Expanding cinema. Amsterdam University Press.
Lie, S., & Fairfax, D. (Eds.). (2020). Towards a political aesthetics of cinema: The outside of film. Routledge.
Shapiro, M. J. (2020). The cinematic political: Film composition as political theory. Routledge.
Olenina, A. H. (2020). Psychomotor aesthetics: Movement and affect in modern literature and film. Oxford University Press.
Mee, S. J. (2020). The pulse in cinema: The aesthetics of horror. Edinburgh University Press.
Walley, J. (2020). Cinema expanded: Avant-garde film in the age of intermedia. Oxford University Press.
Pagello, F. (2020). Quentin Tarantino and film theory: Aesthetics and dialectics in late postmodernity. Palgrave Macmillan.
Penman, I. (2023). Fassbinder: Thousands of mirrors. Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Critical essay; poetic writing on cinema as a perceptual experience.
Gilbey, R. (2024). It used to be witches: A journey through queer cinema. Faber & Faber.
A contemporary approach to cinema as sensitive and affective memory.
Bazin, A. (1958). Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ? Paris, France: Éditions du Cerf.
Bachelard, G. (1942). L’eau et les rêves: Essai sur l’imagination de la matière. Paris, France: José Corti.
Bachelard, G. (1957). La poétique de l’espace. Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France.
Deleuze, G. (1983). Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement. Paris, France: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Deleuze, G. (1985). Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Paris, France: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Rancière, J. (2001). L’inconscient esthétique. Paris, France: Galilée.
Cavell, S. (1979). The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tarkovsky, A. (1986). Sculpting in Time. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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