This paper reconsiders the complex and somewhat ambivalent relationships between the cinematographic image and the globalized world as it is characterized by flows (of images, among other flows). For this purpose, the paper examines different aesthetic forms that contemporary cinema gives to the image-flow – taking into account the editing as well as the framing resources –, based on a multiple corpus of both blockbusters and author films. The analysis aims at bringing out the poetic and affective effects of these representations of the flow. In particular, the paper suggests that contemporary cinema offers a new tragic vision of the flow, which it links to the melancholic or depressive affect.