This article offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Jean-Luc Godard’s video short Puissance de la parole (1988). It engages with key historical figures in film, visual art and music, positioning Godard’s video mashup as a violent intermedial space where past and future meet. Exploring techniques of fragmentation, decontextualization and recombination, and examining Godard’s appropriation of two key paintings by Francis Bacon (the static Study from the Human Body and the dynamic Figure in Movement), this article investigates the bond that ties Maurice Ravel’s La Valse, a ‘choreographic poem’ for the stage, to Godard’s videographic poem for the screen.