Tarkovsky is considered to be the master of poetic cinema, work on his films anyway actualizes the issue of balance between cinematic and poetic in it. But director’s own perception of the considered phenomenon set out in the article named “Captured in time” (1967) is significantly different from the opinion of most researchers: he rather polemicises with ideologists of poetic cinema than agrees. Criticizing the category of poetic cinema, he introduces his own term that allows characterizing a ratio of cinematic to poetic – “cinematic poetry”. It becomes more difficult to talk about director’s relation to the genre also because of the vagueness of the considered concepts. The boundaries between category of poetic cinema and other related (poetry in cinema, videopoetry, cinematic poetry and mediapoetry) grow increasingly less distinct the term becomes an empty signifier. The paper attempts to analyse the film “Mirror” by A. Tarkovsky, often regarded as a poetic cinema, using two theoretical frameworks: the one, developed by the director and the other, synthetic, based on formalists’ cinematic research and literary theorists’ views on the phenomenon of poetry. It turns out that both, author’s concept of cinematic poetry, which involves direct observation of life, as well as the category of poetic cinema, that we understand as a form of organisation, are applicable to the movie. Such analysis leads the article to the conclusion that considered approaches are not mutually exclusive, but it’s important to strictly differentiate the terms.