Imagine a version of the “News on the March” mock-u-newsreel early in Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” devoted to the life of the director Robert Altman, a filmmaker whose multiple comebacks became a one-man refutation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s oft-quoted observation that there are no second acts in American lives.

Flickering vintage images of Kansas City, Altman’s 1925 birthplace, would give way to stills of Altman’s parents, a blustery insurance salesman and an ethereal housewife whose lineage stretched back to the Mayflower. Catholic and military school footage would dissolve into clips from Howard Hawks films showcasing influential overlapping dialogue similar to the naturalistic collision of voices Altman for which would one day become famous.

News footage of Franklin Roosevelt declaring war on Japan would become stock shots of B-24s dropping bombs in World War II. A stentorian narrator would compare the high altitudes from which army pilot Altman flattened Pacific island targets to the ironic distance from which director Altman would later skewer American institutions and genres in his films. The palm trees and star homes of Hollywood would flash by twice: once when Altman plied the storytelling trade as a marginally successful writer on his way back from the war, and again a half decade later following clips from the industrial films he wrote, directed, and edited back in Kansas City in between trips west.

The paradoxes would grow. Footage from the scores of TV shows Altman directed in the early 1960s would share the screen with cascading dollar bills representing the fees he earned and the gambling losses that claimed them. Clips of the varied scenes of female humiliations from Altman’s paradigmatic movies would contrast with praise from the half-dozen actresses he shepherded to Oscar nominations.

Black list survivor Ring Lardner Jr. would shout down Altman’s stated claim to full authorship of “M*A*S*H,” while Joan Tewkesbury would applaud the results of Altman’s near abandonment of her script to “Nashville.” Pot-smoking Hollywood “outsider” Altman would be shown signing the paperwork that created LionsGate Films, a company that would become a hugely successful distributor of mainstream movies soon after its founder’s departure.

Eventually, we’d have to arrive at the same conclusion that Charles Foster Kane’s film biographers reached: No single word can sum up a man’s life. But unlike Kane, when “as it must to all men,” death came to Robert Altman just seven weeks ago, the warehouse full of masterpieces he left in his wake is about to be opened and exhibited, not tossed into a furnace.

Starting today, IFC Center presents “An Artist and a Gambler: Robert Altman Remembered.” During the past decade, as the director successfully resurrected his career yet again and his formally unique filmmaking style of the ’70s became absorbed and regurgitated in the mainstream (hopefully Altman shared no terse words with St. Peter at the pearly gates about accidentally godfathering Paul Haggis’s “Crash”), there have been plenty of Altman repertory revivals. Much of his television work from the ’60s has surfaced in DVD collections as well.

In addition to being the first compendium of his films — 27 will be screened — since Altman suffered the ultimate career setback, IFC’s 19-day roundup is notable for unearthing several of his early features and collecting much of his core 1970s, and patchier 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s movies into ingeniously paired (and single admission) double bills. For instance, 1957’s “The Delinquents,” an energetic suburban Kansas City juvenile delinquent independent film notable for catching Alfred Hitchcock’s eye and bringing Altman back to Hollywood, will be paired with 1974’s “Thieves Like Us,” a kind of stoner remake of Nicolas Ray’s 1949 crime romance “They Live By Night.”

Another Altman paradox is that his two biggest commercial successes are two of his least challenging and most literal-minded films. 1970’s M*A*S*H and 1992’s “The Player” are certainly crowd pleasers; the former is a ribald black comedy climaxing in a rowdy football game, the latter a toothless satire that dares to suggest that the American movie business is shallow and morally corrupt. Both films flatter the viewer’s intelligence and appeal to a kind of easy hipster cynicism without really ruffling any establishment feathers.

The real jewels in Altman’s creative crown are the three collaborations he shared with the director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond. 1971’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” and 1972’s “Images” (the third Altman/Zsigmond film, “The Long Goodbye,” will play in a new print at Film Forum in April) are among the most original and visually striking films ever made in widescreen.

The lens is the essential tool of film grammar, and Cinemascope lenses (actually Panavision by the ’70s, but essentially the same process) are characteristically difficult tools with which to take risks. Depth of field is unforgivingly shallow in Cinemascope and focus is hard to maintain even under the best circumstances. But in “Mc-Cabe” and “Images,” Altman and Mr. Zsigmond, working on grueling location shoots, pushed the technical limits of their chosen format to a new and highly influential aesthetic.

Diaphanous, out-of-focus foreground haze folds a peculiar dreaminess and unselfconscious subjectivity into both the gently revisionist Western that is “McCabe” and the slippery first-person head trip of “Images.” And by running two cameras at once (a trick brought along from Altman’s television directing days), Altman and his cameraman captured fragile naturalistic moments with their casts that would never survive multiple takes.

Indeed, for “McCabe,” Altman took an even bolder technical gamble. In order to achieve the washed-out, jaundiced look he envisioned for the turn-of-the-century frontier town of Presbyterian Church, the director instructed Mr. Zsigmond to pre-expose the film stock to light (an imprecise technique called “flashing”) so that the lush Vancouver location’s color palate would be reduced. Had there been any miscalculation, either in flashing or in actual shooting, Altman would have found himself in a pre-digital Hollywood cutting room with miles of unusable footage. Of course, the roll of the technical dice went Altman’s way, and that gorgeous, muted color of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is as unforgettably melancholy as Leonard Cohen’s score.

In lieu of “Rosebud,” perhaps a more appropriate epitaph for Robert Altman lies at the end of another Welles film. A movie stylist of almost perverse restlessness and creativity, Altman used layers of sound and visual texture to show how people fail to communicate. To paraphrase Marlene Dietrich’s tossed-off closing moment “Touch of Evil” eulogy: “He was some kind of a filmmaker. What does it matter what you say about people?”

Through January 23 (323 Sixth Avenue at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).