This article tackles the paradoxical notion of poetic novelization by studying two poetry books written in French in the 2000’s: Vivre sa vie : une novellisation en vers du film de Jean-Luc Godard by Jan Baetens and Flip-Book by Jérôme Game. Although both books share the same principle –narrating films–, I will show that they are in fact very different in the way they envision the relationship between literature and film: by differentiation or by imitation.