Philippe Garrel is probably the greatest director you’ve never heard of, so all hail the BAM Cinematek for organizing their upcoming tribute, fittingly called “Lonely Heart.” Each Garrel film betrays the presence of a mournful soul behind the camera, but the title might just as well refer to Mr. Garrel’s solitary outpost on the ragged edges of contemporary moviemaking.

“My last film cost a little bit less than that car over there,” he was once overheard remarking at a film festival. Not that he would have it any other way. Here is a strictly artisanal, defiantly personal cinema, made for an audience that might or might not exist in the future. Here is an artist who listens to his own muse and nothing else.

As his great admirer Olivier Assayas is quoted as saying in the BAM program: “He’s the closest thing to a poet functioning today in French cinema.” Mr. Assayas is almost right. A better way to put it would be to say that, with Tarkovsky dead and Bernardo Bertolucci gone to seed, Mr. Garrel, along with his friend Leos Carax, is the only poet functioning today in all of narrative cinema.

When he made his first short film 40 years ago at the age of 16, Mr. Garrel was proclaimed “the Rimbaud of the cinema.” In some ways, the description still fits. “Oh! infinite egoism of adolescence, and studious optimism. How full of flowers was the world that summer! Melodies and forms dying”- this passage from “20 Years Old” in Rimbaud’s “Illuminations” could describe the tone as well as the emotional arc of any Garrel film, in which beauty and decay, the dreams of youth and the verities of age, promise and defeat, are never far apart.

Mr. Garrel’s material is his immediate experience and nothing else – “the life of the artist” as he puts it. He films the small things – meals, reveries by the sea, two old friends driving all night and crossing the Italian border at daybreak, a toddler walking in on his parents as they’re making love – with a poet’s attention. A close-up of two hands clasping under a table becomes deeply moving, even stirring. A woman contentedly working at her sewing machine is, as filmed by Mr. Garrel, a vision of happiness.

Such an autobiographical bent would hardly be noteworthy in a contemporary poet, but it is an anomaly in the cinema. His father, the great actor Maurice Garrel (last seen as the dying patriarch in “Kings and Queen”), has appeared in many of Mr. Garrel’s films, almost always as … the father. He has also cast his son Louis (star of his dad’s upcoming May 1968 “epic” “Everyday Lovers” and of Bertolucci’s resoundingly awful film on the same subject, “The Dreamers”) as well as an assortment of former wives and girlfriends, and himself.

And then there is Nico. Everyone’s favorite dark icon of the 1960s lived with Mr. Garrel for eight years. They made seven films together, and her presence has haunted Mr. Garrel’s work since her death in 1988. Many women have served as Nico figures in Mr. Garrel’s movies, none more poignantly than the beautiful Dutch actress Johannater Steege in the 1991 “I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore,” playing August 16. This pocket-sized emotional autobiography is an extraordinarily delicate meditation on time and loss, made all the more poignant by the fact that its melancholy star and Garrel stand-in, Benoit Regent, died of an aneurism three years after it was made.

This retrospective offers a good selection of Mr. Garrel’s work, with two examples from his early non-narrative period, the magical, incantatory “Inner Scar” (August 8) and the rarely seen “High Loneliness” (August 22), a wordless film featuring the late, lovely Jean Seberg. The 1993 “The Birth of Love” (August 30) with Jean-Pierre Leaud and Lou Castel as two sad pals watching life flow by like a river is one of his most beautiful films, shot in achingly beautiful black and white by the master cameraman Raoul Coutard (four of the eight films in this series are in black and white, as is the new film).

Finally, I would like to say a word for the unjustly overlooked 1996 “Phantom Heart” (August 23), starring the wiry Portuguese actor Luis Rego as the Garrel surrogate. This little film may not be as perfectly acted and visualized as the 1999 widescreen “Night Wind” (August 29, featuring a great performance by Catherine Deneuve), but it is the wiser, more surprising work.

You may be asking: Why bother with these movies about people sitting around and feeling sad? The answer is simple: poetry. Philippe Garrel can do something of which very, very few of his contemporaries are capable: He can film ordinary events and show us eternity.

Until August 30 (30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).