If the relations between cinema and poetry have been well explored by critics and artists since the advent of the avant-garde of the 1920s, evincing multiple affinities in terms of techniques and aesthetic objectives, the intermedial nature of poetic cinema remains less well defined. This article aims to address this omission by focusing on the ‘lost child of the New Wave’, the French filmmaker Guy Gilles (1938-1996), whose intermedial work is only now being rediscovered. Guy Gilles’s film Au pan coupé (Wall Engravings, 1967) in particular instantiates a complex interweaving of poetry and cinema, as much in its form as in its content. Gilles’s poetic film calls for a closer analysis of how both media are entangled, reaching a state of photogenic intensity (Jean Epstein) that evades narrativity and denies conceptual categories, ushering in what the authors, drawing on Yves Bonnefoy’s theoretical texts, call Gilles’s cinepoetics of presence.