“Hidden in each of us,” reads the prologue to British director Thorold Dickinson’s 1952 film “Secret People,” “is a secret person often unknown even to ourselves. The force of circumstances can drive us to a point at which this inner character takes charge and alters the course of our lives.”

The nine feature films that make up Dickinson’s 15 years as a commercial filmmaker might all begin with the same epitaph. Uncompromising in technique and unwavering in his humanism, Dickinson (1903–84) mined the tense dramatic relationship between identity and action with unwavering clarity, compassion, and invention. For the next week, in its program called Thorold Dickinson’s World of Cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will survey the brief but brilliant career of this rarely revived yet central figure in British cinema.

Born in Bristol to a family whose lineage included Lady Godiva, Dickinson was expelled from Oxford when his studies began to take a backseat to a growing passion for theater and film. From the outset, Dickinson made little distinction between film appreciation and filmmaking. He was a loyal member of London’s Film Society, a highly influential organization whose regular attendees included a young Alfred Hitchcock. Dickinson’s work as an editor at Cricklewood and Ealing studios exhibited a keen appreciation of Soviet montage and other imported stylistic influences championed by the Society.

Britain’s 1927 protectionist film quota legislation, which required British exhibitors to screen a prescribed percentage of homegrown product, was a boon for nascent native directors such as Dickinson. Virtually guaranteed a theatrical release because of the quota’s provisions, Dickinson, who had supervised portions of various films through the 1930s, made his legitimate directorial debut with 1937’s independently produced “The High Command.” He followed this conventionally written but expertly directed thriller with two documentaries about the Spanish Civil War (“Spanish A.B.C.” and “Behind the Spanish Lines”) and another “quota quickie” thriller, the tongue-in-cheek “Arsenal Stadium Mystery.”

Once established as a resourceful and thrifty director, Dickinson received his next feature assignment a mere three weeks before principal photography was supposed to begin. The result, 1940’s “Gaslight,” is a film of such meticulously fostered suspense and verve that it’s hard to believe its director was a last-minute substitute. Starring the great Viennese actor Anton Walbrook, whose powerful, camera-friendly gaze and superb voice were used to equally great effect by Max Ophuls and Michael Powell, “Gaslight” proved so impressive that Dickinson was summoned to Hollywood by David O. Selznick. But unlike Hitchcock, who had recently taken Selznick up on a similar offer, Dickinson declined. Selznick contented himself with purchasing the remake rights to “Gaslight” (and making it almost impossible to see Dickinson’s version in America). The film was given a glossy and gushy makeover by George Cukor four years later.

After crafting “The Prime Minster” (1941), a suitably patriotic biopic about Benjamin Disraeli featuring in the title role one of John Gielgud’s relatively rare ’40s screen appearances, Dickinson volunteered the services Selznick had sought in Hollywood to the British War Ministry’s Directorate of Army Kinematography. Ealing Studios producing legend Michael Balcon matched the Ministry of Information’s paltry production budget for a training film assignment eventually titled “Next of Kin,” allowing Dickinson to transform a “loose lips sink ships” propaganda piece into a dark meditation about Britain’s emotional and practical preparedness for war. Initially banned by Winston Churchill upon its release in 1942, “Next of Kin” vindicated Balcon’s investment by becoming a box office hit. The film remains the prime example of the small group of evenhanded and surprisingly fatalistic British war-era propaganda dramas (such as Alberto Cavalcanti’s “Went the Day Well”) released the same year.

“The Queen of Spades” (1949) was another last-minute assignment and another advantageous collaboration with Walbrook. Based on a short story by Alexander Pushkin, “The Queen of Spades” is a masterpiece of low-budget visual invention. A film in which ambiguity, melodrama, the supernatural, and the psychological all collide and combine with chilling precision, “The Queen of Spades” is one of the unsung films of Britain’s rocky postwar movie years and deserves to be as recognized as the Josef von Sternberg and Max Ophuls films it resembles.

“Secret People,” Dickinson’s final British-produced feature, was a long-gestating labor of love for the director but a critical and financial bust. Briefly relocated to Israel, Dickinson made his last — and his host country’s first — feature, “Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer,” in 1955. A man of both a highly developed political conscience and a boundless enthusiasm for the art and history of film, Dickinson spent the rest of the ’50s as Unesco’s chief of film services, and then the rest of his life as a film educator, chiefly at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, where he was named Britain’s first professor of film in 1967. Despite working in an industry renowned for tolerating, if not cultivating, apolitical ego and narcissistic behavior, Dickinson combined a pronounced flair for personal but accessible artistic creation with a responsibility for public service to a degree unmatched by nearly any other 20th-century filmmaker working in the English language.

Through March 25 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).