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film poetics
A tentative genealogy of film poetics, written as part of the extended project Degrowing Poetics (2026)
by Miki Ambrózy
Film Poetics
March 2026Film and Poetry - Poetics in Experimental Film
Poem film, film poem, poetry-film, film-poetry, videopoetry, filmpome…
Essay, messay, essaying, essay film, film essay, videoessay, essay performance..
Focusing on defining the concepts of experimental and poetics shines the light on two specific areas of practices within film culture—film poems and the video essay. These are hybrid forms where (moving) images enter a relationship with language, manifested as words, writing, voices, and sounds—extending into the pro-filmic as well as the performative. I consider, for example, that scripts, scores, notes, conversations, and different drafts also constitute this field, allowing for the parallel accumulation and overwriting of language as grapheme and trace.[1] What complicates matters is the encounter with the immanent knowledge of audiovisuality.
Film poems can be mimetic—imitating nature in representational ways. In line with the ambition of a degrowing poetics (Ambrózy 2026), this practice can be ignored here. In discursive creative practice, the essay can manifest in different material forms. It can be written, recorded, captured, composed, edited, frayed, performed, and more.[2] Essayistic and poetic forms have shown a remarkable ability to meander, weave, layer, reveal, surprise, interplay, co-compose, upturn, run, glide—the list goes on. This applies to both material and symbolic relations within and beyond text.
Film Poetics
Film poetics, in a conventional view, is a specific practice of meaning-making through material combinations of all the above, augmented through composition, movement, scale, and so on. Sarah Keller points out that a close understanding of the different modes of moving image practice is necessary for a more nuanced reading of such work (Keller 2023). Fil Ieropoulos, whose historical synthesis I consider an excellent source, points out “how chaotic the notion of the film poem has been in the last eighty years and how difficult it is to talk about a specific definition of its characteristics.” He bemoans the fact that “even the historical analyses of the film poem are often written by individuals who have interests in promoting particular characteristics of it” (Ieropoulos, date unknown). Dissenting views, and situated positions, are organic part of this milieu. A more important question becomes, perhaps, what is the ethics of promoting one characteristic over another?
William Wees—a scholar of specializing in experimental and avantgarde film—observed in the 1980s that there was a shifting relationship unfolding between film artists and poets. Wees emphasizes the productive tension this held for artistic expression. Poetry-film
“expands upon the specific denotations of words and the limited iconic references of images to produce a much broader range of connotations, associations, metaphors. At the same time, it puts limits on the potentially limitless possibilities of meaning in words and images, and directs our responses toward some concretely communicable experience” (1984, 10; emphases mine).
Fil Ieropoulos has argued that “text as word or image, spoken voice as words or sounds and the question of whether image or concept come first in a human mind” are still relevant inquiries today (Ieropoulos). These questions aren’t novel by any means, “the shift from attention to form to attention to process and concept as the primary force of poetic composition” have been with us since the mid-20th century. A potential new direction for this inquiry opens up by tracing the theory of the imaginary, as developed by Kristupas Sabolius. At the same time, what matters for artistic research is how we experiment with these limitless possibilities.
In the words of Abigail Child: “The very act of translating these language systems, these two unparalleled signaling systems [i.e. writing and film], is by definition approximate. The slippage creates its own exhilaration. The effort structures new potentials" (2005, xxi). Commenting on Child’s work in This is Called Moving, Tom Gunning suggests that working with language and film must begin by approaching their differences, or “the lack of a double articulation in cinema, that essential aspect of language whereby words can be broken into letters or phonemes—elements whose significance does not carry meaning but simply indicates difference” (2005, xviii). When images are broken down, they don't produce a system of defined elements like letters.
What is distinct in expanded and analogue film practice, as scholar Jonathan Walley has argued recently, is an unwavering spirit of inquiry, which manifests as experimentation with potentialities. Insisting on cinema’s specificities, Walley touches on a crucial aspect of the contemporary scene where film and video seem to have become interchangeable on the surface of things. He elaborates on the “ontological restlessness and essenceless-ness” of the field of cinema, observing that neither the physical media nor traditional exhibition define or exhaust the term. “Cinema remains cinema in an expanded field”, it has not become intermedia (2020). This restless spirit is evident, for example, in Abigail Child’s cinematic research, where “Cinema and poetry share (…) the possibility of manipulating a language (or imagery and sound) generally taken for granted and subjecting it to shocks, interruption, gaps, and space” (Gunning 2005, xix).
Walley’s framework attempts to capture the specific synergy of material and maker, by which he places avantgarde on an equal footing with other material-based art forms, such as painting and sculpture, including approaches to exhibiting cinema-proximate works. In a similar vein, the dissertation of Fil Ieropoulos resolves the question of moving images and poetry by suggesting that expanding the film poem onto the form of multi-screen installation could break away from the linearity of single-screen work. The multi-screen form enables the film poem to be more in tune with the viewer’s open exploration (2010).
Studied from the angle where poetics (writing) and experimental film (images) are treated as equally potent elements, a comprehensive elaboration is given by Tom Könyves in his manifesto for videopoetry (2011). He suggests that the main task of videopoetry is:
“to demonstrate the process of thought and the simultaneity of experience, expressed in words —visible and/or audible—whose meaning is blended with, but not illustrated by, the images and the soundtrack.”
In historicizing experimental cinema, scholars and practitioners often divide the field into expressionist and structuralist camps. With the exception of a few synthesizing voices in the field (such as Karel Doing), such division is both misleading and difficult to defend. Könyves is looking for balance as well, acknowledging the necessary role of “narrative moments” to sustain the viewer’s engagement with the works. At the same time, the instability of language (either as the content or the form of a work) is a positive quality that can prolong the poetic experience. Echoing my own call for nonfinite forms in the Situating section, he writes:
“What is specific to a hybrid form like videopoetry is not what is specific to its elements… Text, image and sound tend to arrive complete-in-themselves, self-sufficient, if you will. For the hybrid form, the specificity, I would suggest, is in the collaborative properties (a more accurate term may be synergistic properties) of the individual elements. In other words, not all texts (a good example would be most previously published poems), not all images (obviously) or soundtracks embody collaborative or synergistic potential. This collaborative property implies an incompleteness, indicating the presence of accommodating spaces in each of the elements."
(Könyves 2016)
Essayistic and Fictocritical
In the hands of artists, the video essay has become a tool to reveal constellations and micro-narratives. Ursula Biemann’s work is one such example. In Performing the Border (1999–2003), she uses video for a topographic exploration of Juarez, a Mexican city on the border with the U.S. The video addresses questions around international labor division, migration, and the sexualization of female bodies. The work is created through a videographic logic, carried out by a collectively situated feminine body. Biemann’s practice is coupled with discursive texts presented in different contexts.[3] Through different iterations of the work, she performs the videographic re-signification of difference, expanding the space in which we can write and speak of the feminine.
We could say that Biemann uses a videographic approach to investigate the interplay of the symbolization of her subjects and their economic, material reality. Her work embodies the performative act of “doing” border. A decade later, another argument emerges. In Hito Steyerl’s hands, the video essay becomes a tool for tracing the origins of images in circulation, revealing the contradictions of contemporary capitalist production.
The essayistic condition can represent both a fragile non-commercial opposition and a manipulative reality of “denying” discontinuity. Spanning several video essays and articles, Steyerl convincingly argues for the careful deconstruction of dynamics that look similar only on the surface. “Essays now look amazingly similar to the collaged daily schedule of any contemporary working mom, to a zapping spree with a voiceover, or maybe just to a Sunday afternoon remix contest on YouTube” (2017). She proposes that retracing the trajectories of concrete images and sounds can be a productive strategy. This gesture incorporates the “richly layered history” of images, where translation, alternation, appropriation, and re-contextualization take place at different moments in time.
Her observation on the moving image essay echoes Claire Bishop’s views on research-based installation art: “For fabulation to have critical currency, it matters which histories are being retrieved and why” (Bishop 2023). My two examples suggest that the videographic essay can speak on behalf of a collective body and engage with contradiction.
On the side of textual forms, the videographic essay has a potential sibling in fictocritical writing. In this loosely outlined domain of creative writing, fabulation contributes to an elaboration of the world or a process, hybridizing the lines between (critical) theory and creative writing. Fictocriticism cannot be defined as a style or genre but rather as a “sensibility through which one writes” (Rhodes 2015). It is an experimental process, particularly resistant to genre classification due to the manifold contexts that give rise to its becoming. We should see it as an approach that “appears as a solution to a problem” (Maroto 2023). The fictocritical adds a touch of speculation and can reveal the inner workings of processes in-becoming. One example is Barbara Browning’s novel The Gift, which turns real-life characters into fictional figures, to speak about the ethical dilemmas of online intimacy and online lives while engaged in an exchange of artworks as gifts [4] (Browning 2017).
A connection between these two forms, the videographic essay and the fictocritical, is the shift from writing after the fact to writing in-the-act. Della Pollock invites us to see performative writing as a technique that is neither merely technical nor purely stylistic or instrumental. It is a dynamic response in a given context – a moment of being in the middle (1998). Pollock notices how writing is not to blame for creating lifeless or dull texts; rather, it is the absence of performance in knowledge formation that leads to what she calls betrayal. She advocates for making writing that speaks to/of/through pleasure, possibility, disappearance, and pain. She offers a framework that is normative, not based on form and stylistic effect. In other words, she assigns a social-epistemological function to the act of writing.
Just as when we are close-reading fictocritical texts, Pollock argues that performative writing is evocative in its hybridization of the boundaries between creative and critical writing. Text is intentionally left “discontinued and open for the interpretive work of the reader, which the writing is at pains to p/re/structure fictocritically” (Haas, 27). This double tension makes writing an event of artistic research. We find echoes of this argument in other expanded disciplinary domains, such as performance studies. In the words of Richard Schechner:
If you’re going to take a work and really measure it and write about it, then in a certain sense you destroy it. But if you hold it you can’t measure it. But we each, I feel, have the capacity to both hold and measure. (…) To be indeterminate in a brave way. To be ethical and selfish. (Schechner and Browning 2017)
Thus, we can notice a pattern in thinking about this space—a space I refer to in Degrowing Poetics as the milieu (Ambrózy 2026). Performative writing encounters thinking on the way to being partially shaped through an audiovisual apparatus.
To conclude, let’s carry forward the following relational elements from this encounter between film, essaying, and poiesis:
▪ One, moving images have a certain essenceless-ness (Walley), which requires situated knowledge of both material and modes of production (Keller).
▪ Two, in a free-form writing of the video essay or film poem, the historical situatedness and trajectories should be engaged (Steyerl).
▪ Three, the forms of film poem and video essay share a degree of incompleteness, in their different co-figurations (image, sound, text etc.), creating the synergistic potential when they domeet (Pollock, Könyves, Biemann), as well as drawing in the reader to interpret the text (Haas)
▪ Four, the instability of language that can produce the poetic leap—“forces that do not pass through the circuits of knowledge” (Bachelard 1964, xvii).
▪ Five, the instability of these forms can lead to assembly of elements in a certain order, allowing for a more open (or a more limited) engagement (Ieropoulos, Wees, Könyves) or to speak on behalf of a colletive body (Biemann); while on the side of a feminist reading, writing doing is valuable because we can speak to knowledge in its formation by being in the middle of experience (Pollock).
If film (and the act of imaging) has its own material specificity, as in analogue practice, then what is the material specificity of poem or essay (and their writing)? And, more crucially for looping a milieu into this spiral, how can film or essayistic poiesis co-respond with other life? What could be a non-representational way to describe the poiesis in bird song, the light-sensing interaction of plants, the chemical responses of single-celled bacteria, or the enzyme activity of fungi?
Examples and Counter-Examples
Let me now briefly review examples where artistic research is co-composing writing with/through moving images. In mapping the transversal potential of each “known” form, I am going to inquire what potential each carries for constituting new processes. Following Manning’s observation that “modes of knowledge are always actively reorienting themselves when they encounter each other,” I argue that new processes and resulting new forms allow us to stay “indeterminate in a brave way.”
Videographic Writing
One example of this co-composition is the genre of video articles developed within the framework of the Journal of Embodied Research (Spatz).[5] This journal illustrates the idea that artistic research thrives in a multi-modal milieu, using digital editing, text, video, space, bodies, duration, and more. The concept of videographic thinking challenges the traditional hegemony of texts by questioning their primacy over criticality, since the primacy of the written is thrown in doubt. Ben Spatz has demonstrated the discursive practice of videographic entanglements in a workshop setting at our research symposium (Ambrózy et al. 2023, Vilnius Academy of Arts).
Process Cinema
“Process cinema” refers to a tradition in alternative filmmaking that is unscripted, improvisational, participatory, and based on the manipulation of the very materiality of film. The practice was recently documented and historicized in a title from the Canadian film studies context (Mackenzie and Marchessault 2019). They reference Whitehead’s definition of process, a refined “interplay between potential and activity, between the in-act of the occasion of experience and the flow of its relational interplay.”
Works in this lineage call themselves artisanal because they involve the direct crafting of the elements of the moving image, usually by manipulating small-gauge film, although not all works are entirely produced/distributed on celluloid. There is an emphasis on the fluid integration of writing, shooting, and editing, with works frequently cycling back and forth between these stages, in opposition to the dominant narrative of production as a highly-structured, low-risk activity. Process cinema can be compared to improvisation in music or the experimental tradition of spontaneous prose familiar from Beat literature. Process cinema stands in tension with post-representation and immateriality, as artists often control the physical transformations of image and sound from start to finish, maintaining and measuring their material throughout.
The shared argument for both videographic thought (in the academic context) and process cinema (as an alternative to dominant forms of cinema) is the displacement of a text’s or script’s assumed stability. If the text or script does not hold authority over stable meaning, then other elements of the event remain active. These could include moving images, bodies, gestures, technologies, or technological breakdowns. “Without the blanket of preconception, the processes of collect, reflect, revise mirror the underpinnings of your formation” (Phil Hoffman 2014, 292). This approach assumes a state of attunement and contemplation.
Text on/through Film
The tradition of expanded screen-writing is another area where intentional experiments with writing doing on the cinema screen can be found. Rooted in the western experimental cinema tradition, research conducted by numerous pioneers of experimental film continues to influence contemporary artists. Spanning multiple discursive fields, the collection Screen Writings offers one possible historical review (MacDonald 1995). My own research has led me to curate films by fellow artists who continue exploring the text/image relations (Herman Asselberghs, Nazli Dincel, and Guy Sherwin).
Experiments with text on film have been interpreted, theorized, and historicized since the 1940s. Today, experimentality with moving images has become a list of historically inscribed tactics. These tactics, formal and conceptual, carry variable connotations in changing contexts.[6] What loosely unites the practices is the desire to critique dominant modes of production and forms of moving image culture. To give a local example, while recent schools or movements of experimental cinema may not be prominent in Lithuania, we can observe the ongoing re-application and variation of the parameters of minor cinemas, which are actualized to support contemporary themes. A genealogy is thus emplaced within a fragmented field, anticipating actualization along familiar or unfamiliar lines. These tactics become effects, often without revealing their genealogy. The practices of text on film are often intra-disciplinary, even when their structure contains self-reflexivity.
Essay as Film Performance
One instance of this form is the performance granitepoints: Film Gestures in Minor Key(Ambrózy 2023).[7] This live performance tells the story of a film-in-becoming titled Granite Point. The piece explores the social performance of writing for and through film, with a resulting meshwork of fictocritical, visual, sonic, and performative elements. This work reflects on collective authorship, moving the focus from the individual to the event. Multiple narrators and characters vie for attention, including the film itself, performed by sound artist Gailė Griciūtė.[8] The film writes itself, revealing its own process. The encounter with power relations embedded in conventions of production come to light. The transformations of the fictiocritical script and the re-annotation of the material for specific discursive situations reflect different modes of writing.
These four sets of examples demonstrate that the expanded video essay and the film poem are rich containers for artistic research, capable of surprise, openness, and poetic leaps.
[1] In a typically humanistic argument, some point out that the poetry-film must involve “a verbal poetic statement in narrated or captioned form” (Herman Berlandt, 1984. In: Wees). It is helpful that this formulation excludes the generic sense of “poetic” by insisting on a specific relationship to verbal expression.
[2] See, for example, the recent publication “From the Scenic Essay to the Essay Exhibition. Expanding the Essay Form in the Arts Beyond Literature and Film” (Ghent University, 2023)
[3] Different elaborations of Biemann’s work amount to what Juha Varto calls the articulation of research in its discursive performance (2018). In other words, the discursive performance of the video essay Performing the Border is transformed into an episteme – among other things, through her article Performing Borders – Transnational Video (2003). Within the transfer from work of art to academic article, new knowledge can manifest.
[4] The book uses two collaborative, semi-fictional relationships: one with a musician in Germany whom she encountered on the internet, and one with a conceptual artist in New York. The exchange of links to meta-fictional artworks completes the book.
[5] https://jer.openlibhums.org/
[6] Balsom, Erika. After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation. Film and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
[7] A double 16mm projection of typographic animations, with a single-screen video projection.
[8] This work that has been presented in various ways to different audiences and exists in versions tailored to specific contexts. Suspaustas Laikas Experimental Film and Arts Festival, August 2023. Nida, Lithuania. International Conference: Personal Perspective and Essayistic Form in Nonfiction Film and Art. September 22–23, 2023, Vilnius, Lithuania. It embodies writing from the milieu through its contact with both critical and poetic modes of writing, which are re-produced with each performance.