Even by the standards of its own reliably eccentric calendar, Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives, “the first museum devoted to film as an art form” (according to its Web site), has lately offered an unusually eclectic bill of film fare on its two screens. Beginning today, Anthology will honor a self-declared commitment “to the guiding principle that a great film must be seen many times, that the film print must be the best possible, and that the viewing conditions must be optimal,” with a revival of the actor, director, and comedian Albert Brooks’s first two features, 1979’s “Real Life” and 1981’s “Modern Romance.”

According to Anthology’s archivist, Andrew Lampert, and its programmer, Jed Rapfogel, the Brooks mini-retrospective has been gestating since the two were in junior high school in St. Louis. “Jed and I have known each other since seventh grade,” Mr. Lampert said recently in the reverberative confines of the Anthology lobby. “Sometime in eighth grade, we decided that one day in New York we’d show Albert Brooks’s work. It’s been our life’s goal to do this.”

Mr. Brooks’s features and his short films, aired on “Saturday Night Live,” were tonally of a piece to the two future curators.

“I think we both responded early on to comedy that was ultra-understated and ultra-blank-faced and very much about these ultimately really painful things,” Mr. Rapfogel said, describing Mr. Brooks’s then unique combination of on-screen narcissism and miserabilism as a meshing of “embarrassing, awkward, painful, and very self-critical things presented in a comedic way.”

Though Mr. Brooks, a Beverly Hills native, has directed a half dozen more features since making “Real Life” 29 years ago, the two nascent curators consciously narrowed their high school appreciation to his earliest movies, with one unfortunate omission. “Our future vision also included ‘Lost in America,'” Mr. Lampert said of Mr. Brooks’s third feature, from 1985. “But it turns out there’s no print of it anywhere.” An apparent victim of indifference on the part of Warner Bros., which owns the film, “Lost in America” has fallen through the distribution cracks. “It’s shocking that there’s no print of ‘Lost in America’ out there,” Mr. Rapfogel said. “Those three movies belong together.”

The after-death comedy “Defending Your Life” (1991), Mr. Brooks’s next film after “Lost in America,” ended a half-decade retreat from the director’s chair and represented a marked change in the filmmaker’s comic tone — one that helped further define what had been so appealing about the films that came before it.

“I think people that are into Brooks’s work look at it through the lens of his first three films,” Mr. Lampert said. “I know we do.” “Real Life” and “Modern Romance” are driven by, in Mr. Rapfogel’s words, “a comedy about looking deep within the ugliest things in you, training your gaze on that, and celebrating that. You get to ‘Defending Your Life’ and, though it’s good, it’s already beginning to show this sentimentality that’s completely lacking in everything he did before that, and then it’s a downward spiral.”

The other signature quality evident in Mr. Brooks’s first two films, which will screen in immaculate archival prints at Anthology, is a subtle visual inventiveness. “I don’t want to make a case for him being some kind of Tati or something,” Mr. Rapfogel said. “But with those first films, there are very purposeful directorial choices. He’s conveying a lot of comedy through the composition and the editing.”

Mr. Lampert agrees that despite the fact that Mr. Brooks remains front and center on-screen in his latter-day work, with each post-“Lost in America” outing, the auteurist trail grows increasingly cold behind the camera. “There’s a certain choreography to the action in his first three films that gets lost in the later ones as he searches for verbal gags rather than visual ones. There’s a whole sequence of him on pills in ‘Modern Romance,’ for instance, that’s a single take.”

While the comedy belonged to Mr. Brooks, that visual harmony can be at least partly traced to the cinematographer Eric Saarinen, a veteran of documentary projects with the Maysles brothers who worked with Mr. Brooks to distinguish both the adventurously flat, mockumentary look of “Real Life” and the organic, performance-driven view of Los Angeles in “Modern Romance.” When Mr. Saarinen left feature filmmaking after shooting “Lost in America” to pursue work in the commercial world, Mr. Brooks’s work suffered.

While the cultural prescience on display in “Real Life,” a satire of PBS’s then controversial protoreality TV show, “An American Family,” is fairly staggering when viewed in a contemporary network-programming context, it is Mr. Brooks’s comic persona itself that feels even more ahead of its time.

“Most comedians need approval,” Mr. Rapfogel said. “But Albert Brooks recognizes this intense need for approval and just savagely exploits it.” That unrepentant self-absorption and misanthropy are perfectly in step with such recent genre-bending characters as Garry Shandling’s Larry Sanders, the Larry David of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and Steve Coogan’s Allen Partridge. In 1979, however, Mr. Brooks was charting new character territory.

While acknowledging that Mr. Brooks’s unquenchable neediness has a strong element of the unique “Yiddishism” of Jewish entertainers going back through Al Jolson and Jerry Lewis, Mr. Lampert used another late-’70s screen comedian and “Saturday Night Live” alumnus to illustrate what Mr. Brooks brought to the table in his first two features.

“What year was ‘The Jerk,’ 1979?” Mr. Lampert asked about a film that struck box-office gold the same summer that “Real Life” came and went in a matter of days. “There was nothing introspective about Steve Martin in ‘The Jerk.'” Mr. Martin has gone out of his way to rectify that lack of depth since, resulting in a retooled comic persona that is, in Mr. Lampert’s words, “awful and unfunny.” Ironically, Mr. Brooks, once dubbed “the West Coast Woody Allen,” has taken the opposite route and arrived at the same result. “As Albert Brooks has become less introspective and gone broader, he’s become awful!”

Through April 1 (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).