More than any of the rest of his French new wave contemporaries, filmmaker Claude Chabrol is a masterful and resourceful storyteller. Since his self-financed 1958 debut film, “Le Beau Serge,” Mr. Chabrol’s singular dexterity in handling what he has described as the “confrontation between character and story” has inclined him away from the craven homages and chilly formalism that have often hobbled his peers.

Instead, Mr. Chabrol has always sought out genres and source material that offer a suitable battleground for plot to duke it out with psychology, with maximum truth and intimacy and a bare minimum of modernist winking and deconstruction. During his 50-year career, “Un Film de Claude Chabrol” has become synonymous with a cinema of very smart, skillfully made, and socially trenchant thrillers such as 1960’s “Les Bonnes Femmes,” 1968’s “Les Biches,” 1969’s “Que la bête meure,” and 1970’s “Le Boucher.”

With more than 55 titles to his credit, Mr. Chabrol’s hunger for story has been rapacious. Reconciling the commercial realities of his chosen medium with the need to practice his craft, the diretctor has arguably been less picky in his selection of film projects than many of the Cahiers filmmaking crowd. But, like the work of great Hollywood journeymen such as Don Siegel, Andre de Toth, and Robert Aldrich, who went largely unsung until French critics lionized them in the late 1950s, a Claude Chabrol movie is always compelling, even if the reasons for making it aren’t. Mr. Chabrol’s recent films have received theatrical premieres in America, and his better-known older films have been repeatedly revived on New York’s repertory screens. But what of the dozens of the director’s works that have not?

“He has this hugely prolific career, but so many of his films have never had an American distributor and an American theatrical release,” said Leigh Goldstein, who until recently was an executive curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art. “It’s not like his more widely circulated films don’t deserve a repertory representation. But at the same time, of course you want to see as much of his work as you can.”

Along with MoMA Film Department curator Jytte Jensen, Ms. Goldstein has sought to use MoMA’s two screens to rebalance the repertory scales in favor of Mr. Chabrol’s rarely or never revived films and television projects. The result is “The Other Claude Chabrol,” a 10-day compendium of work encompassing American premiers of recent Chabrol projects as yet undistributed stateside, as well as vintage films that were never imported here, and for the most part remain unavailable on DVD.

A breezy and perverse murder mystery revolving around an unctuous French game show host, 1987’s “Masques” is quintessential Chabrol. Yet its production coincided with a downturn in the fortunes of French film imports on American screens, and “Masques” was never released on these shores. Mr. Chabrol never shied away from making room for popculture in his work, and “Masques” carries on a specific Chabrolian curiosity about television.

“He deals with TV in a lot of his films,” Ms. Goldstein said. “But ‘Masques’ is the one where TV is most specifically equated with a sinister and malevolent character.” It seems sometimes that television game shows are so inherently dehumanizing in the extreme that they defy satire. Yet Philippe Noiret’s smiling emcee, Christian Legagneur, dominates his aging contestants with a smarminess that’s utterly convincing and, “just so creepy,” as Ms. Goldstein put it.

“The Other Claude Chabrol” will give several films Mr. Chabrol made for French television their debuts, including multiple shows from a 1970s miniseries omnibus called “Les Histories Insolites” (“Unusual Stories”), as well as an episode from “Chez Maupassant,” a broadcast omnibus of Guy de Maupassant literary adaptations, entitled “La Parue” (“The Necklace”).

“When you put together a series like this that covers nearly 50 years, you want to try to include a director’s most recent work,” Ms. Goldstein said. The sad truth is that many career retrospectives don’t coincide with a filmmaker’s peak. But Mr. Chabrol, still directing at age 77, has betrayed no signs of fading ability. “We got lucky that such a fantastic film was made so recently,” Ms. Goldstein said. “‘The Necklace’ is definitely one of the highlights of the series.”

Mr. Chabrol has regularly attacked literary adaptations with the same keen sense of the character psychology underlying plot that have made his genre excursions so memorable. “The Necklace” is no exception.

“It’s about avarice, it’s about social pretensions, and humor and comedy and human failings and fallibility,” Ms. Goldstein said. “It really has this bite at the end which is gut wrenching.”

At the other end of both Mr. Chabrol’s career and his proclivity for strong literary source material are two mid-’60s entries into the James Bond-era spy movie craze. Whereas Joseph Losey’s moribund 1966 comic adaptation “Modesty Blaise” and Mario Bava’s garish and chaotic “Danger: Diabolik” (1969) have developed cult followings via reparatory screenings and home video. Mr. Chabrol’s “Le Tigre Aime La Chair Fraiche” (1964) and “Le Tigre se Parfume a la Dynamite” (1966) are two potential cult films still in search of a DVD boxed-set or retro revival.

“They’re really well crafted, really stylish and beautifully shot,” Ms. Goldstein said. “Especially ‘Code Name: Tiger,’ which is in gorgeous black and white.” Neither film was present in Film Forum’s recent James Bond Film retrospective, nor are either available on DVD, where they’d likely be a safe bet for Employee Picks status at Kim’s Videos.

Like many of the offerings in “The Other Claude Chabrol,” The “Tiger” films “came out at a point in Chabrol’s career where people were expecting only one kind of thing from him,” Ms. Goldstein said. “They were definitely not expecting these.”

Through August 27 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).