The First ‘Unnamed’ Poetry Film Symposium

Abstract

This article presents the proceedings of the First “Untitled” Symposium on Poetry Film, held in Beijing on July 13, 2025. Bringing together poets, filmmakers, critics, scholars, and moving-image practitioners, the symposium examines the conceptual boundaries, media-specific qualities, historical genealogies, creative methods, institutional conditions, and future possibilities of poetry film. Lao He retains “untitled” as an open designation, distinguishing films about poets from works whose images are structured poetically, and proposes “writing poetry with the camera” as a central creative principle. Zhang Xianmin approaches the subject through theatrical distribution, film regulation, short-film classification, academic institutions, and research infrastructures, arguing that poetry film and artistically oriented short-form cinema in China lack stable systems of production, documentation, organization, and theoretical recognition. Tang Xiaodu explores montage, modern poetry, and irony, emphasizing how films about poets enter private life, everyday experience, and mental illness while dismantling the traditional mystification of the poet. Jing Wendong formulates the problem of the “limits of lyricism,” warning against sentimentality, narcissism, and emotional manipulation. Zhu Wen argues that poets can introduce a new aesthetic voice into cinema, although poetic habits may also obstruct cinematic creation; cinema has, by now, developed a poetics independent of literary poetry. 

Drawing on film history and contemporary art, Zhu Qi distinguishes among poet biopics, documentaries about poets, and poetry film in a stricter sense. He identifies two principal features of poetry film: montage governed by poetic rather than conventional narrative logic, and images that possess an intrinsic poetic or imagistic quality. Through examples ranging from Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Jonas Mekas to Sergei Parajanov and Marguerite Duras, he situates poetry film within the histories of avant-garde cinema, surrealism, and the essay film. Wang Chao examines the historical affinities among Chinese poetry, literature, and cinema, while stressing that filmmakers must retain critical distance from their subjects rather than surrendering the work to supposedly spontaneous vitality. 

Dai Weina understands poetry film as a new manifestation of primordial poetic consciousness in the age of moving images. Its marginal position outside established academic, institutional, and industrial systems, she argues, preserves its freedom and oppositional intellectual energy. She further contrasts poetic thinking with data-driven, instrumental, and artificial-intelligence-based modes of image production. Sun Meng reconstructs a genealogy of poetic cinema through Russian Formalism, Pasolini, Vico’s “poetic wisdom,” the Chinese tradition of expressive suggestion, and contemporary film theory. She proposes three broad modes: films in which poetry determines the overall structure, films in which poetic experience permeates narrative and human existence, and films that insert lyrical or imagistic passages into conventional storytelling. For Sun, the ideal poetic cinema offers a passage from the self toward a condition of “no-self” and a freer relation between humanity and the world. 

Wang Wangwang emphasizes that cinematic poetry must be materially realized through camera movement, duration, rhythm, and audiovisual relations: the shot itself must become a visible poem. Ding Jianguo stresses intellectual history, aesthetic standards, and film education, criticizing narcissism and self-indulgence in contemporary Chinese-language filmmaking. Using Bi Gan’s work as an example, he highlights the interdependence of philosophical reading, ethnic cultural memory, poetic experience, and cinematic form. 

Jiang Ting places poetry film within a broader history of media transitions from oral culture and print civilization to mechanical reproduction and cinema. He proposes three overlapping categories: films about poets, films possessing poetic structures, and films directed by poets. Chen Jiaping discusses his own works, including Orphan and Poet Ma Yan, explaining how concrete reality, symbolic objects, sound, dreams, subjective shots, and nonfiction materials can be reorganized to produce cinematic emotion; for him, style is the true protagonist of poetry film. Huang Yuanying defines poeticity through uncertainty, incompletion, ambiguity, estrangement, and distance, arguing that mature filmmakers can write poetry through the accumulated intelligence of cinematic form. 

The final phase of the symposium questions the category of the “poetic” itself. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of crystal-time, the rhizome, nomadic thought, and the body without organs, Wang Chao argues that cinema should not remain confined by Pasolini, semiotics, or conventional notions of poetic beauty. Pure optical and sonic situations, discontinuity, and the destabilization of subjectivity may allow cinema to move beyond the self-centered tendencies of lyric poetry. Sun Meng connects this interruption of linear time to Agamben’s concept of messianic temporality. Yin Zixu advances a still more radical proposition: because montage and poetic language share structures of discontinuity and association, “poetry film” may be an obsolete or even pseudo-concept—cinema itself is already poetry in another medium. 

The symposium ultimately refuses a closed definition. In his concluding remarks, Lao He distinguishes poetic atmosphere from poetic structure: the former may range from lyricism and romanticism to silence, while the latter operates beyond linear causality and complete contextual continuity. Poetry film matters not because it can be conclusively named, but because framing, sound, montage, rhythm, silence, discontinuity, paradox, and uncertainty can continually generate a specifically cinematic poetics.