Avant-garde films are the ugly stepchildren of the independent film world. Festival programmers always say nice, encouraging things about them. But most festivals are disinclined to take them very seriously unless they’re forced to do so.

The New York Film Festival is an unusual exception. Every year, unlike most of its peers, it provides an unusually prominent showcase for avant-garde film. As a result, its “Views From the Avant-Garde” sidebar, curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith, has become the avant-garde film world’s de facto arbiter of what’s hot and what’s not. At the very least, it serves as a convenient foil for the heated debates over what a program purporting to cover experimental film ought to cover.

This year’s “Views” program, which screens over two days this weekend, consists of three group shows and seven solo shows. Both includes primarily familiar figures from previous “Views”: Ernie Gehr, Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, Julie Murray, Abigail Child, Michele Smith, and others. They form a short list of some of the best avant-garde filmmakers working today. The titles of the group shows are as inscrutable as ever: “Informed by Fire,” “The Mind Moves Upon Silence,” and “Pang Epoch.” But don’t let the titles scare you away. Many viewers, especially avantgarde novices, are likely to have better luck with this program than one showcasing a single filmmaker.

Predictably, some of the films harp on war. But most of the programs are just eclectic and unusual. Highlights will surely include “Paradise Crushed,” the “last” chapter in Leslie Thornton’s postapocalyptic documentary “Peggy and Fred in Hell,” and Bruce Conner’s “Luke,” a distillation and reworking of footage from the set of “Cool Hand Luke,” featuring Paul Newman. (Unfortunately, none of those titles were available for pre-screening.)

Many of the solo programs should also be excellent. I particularly recommend the programs presented by Lewis Klahr, Peter Kubelka, and the Kuchar brothers. Based on old comic books, Mr. Klahr’s films may seem a bit hermetic to the uninitiated. But confusion will quickly fade. Mr. Klahr considers himself a “time traveler”; his movies transporting him to another era, which he mines for insights into our own.

Iconic Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka is probably best known for his 1960 film “portrait” of Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer, which consisted entirely of assorted lengths of black and white leader punctuated by bursts of white noise. Mr. Kubelka followed this ultima ratio of minimalist filmmaking with “Unsere Afrikareise” (“Our Trip to Africa”), a devastatingly precise send-up of a rich German family’s African safari, presented in the guise of a home movie. And then he apparently opted out of filmmaking altogether, instead delivering quasi-metaphysical lectures on the art of cooking.

Now Mr. Kubelka returns with “Dichtung und Wahrheit” (“Poetry and Truth”), his first film in almost 30 years. Composed entirely of outtakes from what appear to be German or Austrian commercials, the film documents actors and actresses as they attempt to transform themselves into icons of the ideal consumer. Over and over again, a yuppie admires his hair in a storefront display, a woman swoons as she’s fed a square of chocolate, a little girl rocks her doll in its carriage, her mother grimaces into the camera. At first, it seems utterly cynical and robotic, but gradually it becomes more human, until performing an emotion seems as natural as experiencing it.

Mr. Kubelka accompanies his newest film with his first, “Mosaic im Vertrauen” (1954-5). A collaboration with the rather implausibly named Ferry Radax, “Mosaic im Vertrauen” is an echt avant-garde quasi-narrative, something like an Austrian response to Robert Frank’s seminal beat film “Pull My Daisy.” Its young protagonist wanders about the Austrian countryside acting wacky, while the narrator natters away. While the result can be hard to follow, it’s still an excellent, rarely screened film.

On Sunday, John Waters will introduce prodigal filmmaking twins George and Mike Kuchar. The Kuchar brothers started making Regular 8mm movies in the mid-1950s. But ultimately, they were always more underground filmmakers than avant-gardists. It’s no secret that those 8mm films, and the 16mm films that followed, inspired the film style of Mr. Waters.

The Kuchars are proof positive that the avant-garde can filter into the mainstream. Or rather, as George might say, it can pollute the tributaries of the mainstream. Last year, the National Film Preservation Foundation awarded New York’s own Anthology Film Archives a grant to preserve nine of the Kuchar brothers’ early 8mm films. The “Views” program includes four of them, dating from 1959 to 1963.

They’re all fantastic. But Mike Kuchar’s “Born of the Wind,” in which Kuchar regular Donna Kerness plays a unusually tawdry Egyptian princess restored to life by mad scientist Bob Cowan, is especially entertaining. The ultra-low budget, stop motion special effects and “surprise ending” (and boy, is it ever surprising) place it somewhere between Georges Melies and “Planet of the Apes” – a good place to be.

– Brian L. Frye

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We’ve all seen him; a relatively well dressed guy unaccountably buttonholing passers-by in some bustling commuter hub. Only when he gets his face up in ours do we realize that he’s crazy, and we break contact with the man as swiftly as safety allows. In Lodge Kerrigan’s new movie, the man’s name is “Keane,” and Mr. Kerrigan doesn’t break contact with him for a second. Played to the hilt by Damian Lewis, unrecognizable from his role in HBO’s “Band of Brothers,” Edward Keane’s evident schizophrenia has reduced him to a broken-record life of sociopathic impulses, frenzied acts of self-medication, and shuttling back and forth between a rock-bottom North Jersey transient hotel and the Port Authority.

Keane stalks through a self-made paranoid maze centered around the absence of Sophie, his daughter from a failed marriage. Whether Sophie is lost, kidnapped, or with her mother depends largely on which pole Keane’s mood is swinging toward. During a blessedly lucid few days Keane uneasily befriends Lynne (Amy Ryan), a downwardly mobile young mother, and her daughter Kyra (Abigail Breslin). But when he’s thrust, like Dr. Seuss’s Horton the elephant, into a sort of temporary motherhood, Keane faces a challenge to prevail over the same feelings and fears that prized the lid off his sanity in the first place.

It’s reassuring to see this year’s festival championing American films that are virtual advertisements for the saving aesthetic grace of actual film. “Keane” delights in the flexibility of celluloid by presenting the long-take realism that is becoming synonymous with digital video, but in gloriously grainy 35mm film. Getting a discernable image on the bus platforms, motel hallways, and bathrooms would have been impossible with the film stocks available just 10 years ago. In “Keane” Mr. Kerrigan and his director of photography, John Foster, ably remind us that actual film technology has advanced just as much as DV has.

– Bruce Bennett