Offering a study of key developments in the cinema since the 1960s, this work looks at the transformation of film form in its encounter with society, the sacred, the subjective and the presence of the camera, and examines the vitality of the different cinemas of poetry as aesthetic resistance to the forms of filmmaking dictated by the power and money of the Hollywood studios. John Orr analyzes the influential forms of a cinema of poetry in the 1970s features by Altman, Herzog, Malick, Scorsese, Weir, Von Trotta and Tarkovsky, and shows how, in the 1980s and 1990s, the emergence of talented new filmmakers has meant a diffusion of different cinemas of poetry using new techniques and new technologies, as well as the reinvention of science fiction and film noir in American genre. This study concludes that these multiple cinemas of poetry, with their social commitment and stylistic delirium, have created a new freshness, vitality and visual impact to outrivial the mainstream genre products of the Hollywood studios which currently dominate the world.