It’s been more than 20 years since Hou Hsiao-Hsien emerged on the international film scene with a pungent slice of life called “Boys From Fengkuei.” Since then, he has attained a status among film fans equal to that once held by Fellini, Bergman, Kubrick, and Godard – endlessly laud ed by the international press, and celebrated by film festivals and cultural institutions throughout the world.

If he is not exactly the household name those men once were, and if his kingdom does not extend beyond the cultural borders of the little beehive of film culture, it’s because we’re living in a different world now. Artists with contemplative sensibilities have never had an easy time of it, and now it’s tougher than ever.

Mr. Hou has gone through many different moments in his relatively brief career as a filmmaker. First, there were the early musical comedies, virtually unseen in the West. “Green Green Grass of Home,” the earliest film in the retrospective under way at Anthology Film Archives (it screens February 5 & 7), is something of a bridge between his commercial period and his move toward greater, if not complete, artistic freedom with 1983’s “Boys” (February 5 & 7).

Beginning with “Boys” and ending, more or less, with 1989’s “City of Sadness,” there is what I refer to as the “Ozu period,” in which Mr. Hou was seen by Western critics as a new, modernized, and carefully updated variant on the Japanese master. “City of Sadness” – a remarkable historical epic that dealt with the hitherto forbidden subject of the celebrated February 28, 1947 incident, which led to 40 years of martial law in Taiwan – was an artistic as well as a box-office triumph. Like 1985’s autobiographical “Time To Live and a Time To Die” (Today & February 8), the film attains a kind of success only known in recent years by Coppola with “The Godfather” (a Hou favorite), striking all kinds of chords: aesthetic, cultural, emotional, historical.

It was in the early 1990s that Mr. Hou became the filmmaker we know today, with “The Puppetmaster” (February 6 & 12). This was a differ ent kind of historical epic, examining the extraordinary shifts in Taiwan from the turn of the century to the postwar years through the life of Li Tien-Lu, who himself had appeared in several of Mr. Hou’s previous films. (The real Li Tien-Lu appears as himself from time to time, to comment on moments of his life that have just been re-enacted.)

“The Puppetmaster” is at once a biopic, a historical investigation, a fascinating exercise in self-reflection (it makes “American Splendor” look utterly childish by comparison), and a deeply felt meditation on the passing of time. It is also, by any reasonable standard, one of the best films of that decade, as well as one of the most influential: You could feel echoes of Mr. Hou’s aesthetic rippling through the Asian cinema of the 1990s.

Since then, despite his continual slide at the box office, Mr. Hou has gone from one aesthetic peak to the next. Perhaps his two finest achievements have been 1996’s “Goodbye South, Goodbye” (February 6 & 12) and 1998’s “Flowers of Shanghai” (February 9 & 13). “Goodbye South, Goodbye” is a much-maligned but altogether mesmerizing look at modern Taiwan via the lives of three semigangster types, forever on the move and poignantly fixated on some im possible dream of making that last big score. “Flowers of Shanghai,” an altogether different kind of film, is a cinematic immersion experience marked by a rare combination of exquisite subtlety and emotional force.

Some argue Mr. Hou’s aesthetic has become so rarefied as to be forbidding. That strikes me as ridiculous. I will not pretend that his films are easy for Western viewers – or any other viewers for that matter. Given the fact that American movies have now conquered the world, it is no surprise his films seem “difficult”: a word now used to describe anything that can’t be understood in an instant.

Mr. Hou’s films are not difficult, but different. The acting as well as the narrative is fused with the daily action observed within his carefully controlled frames – indeed, Mr. Hou’s storytelling happens within the frame, in shots of lengthy intervals, rather than through a succession of shots. These movies break with a dictum that is embedded in American film school teaching: “Movies move.”

Mr. Hou’s films move, too, but never frenetically or excitedly. Instead, they pulse with movement – there are several moments in “Goodbye South, Goodbye” when movement becomes heartbreaking in and of itself. The opening shot of “Flowers of Shanghai,” which consists of nothing more than a group of ebullient men playing drinking games with their flower girls in a late-19th-century Shanghai brothel, is a tour de force of quickly etched characterizations and perfumed ambience.

And did I forget to mention color? Mr. Hou’s films sing with it. There are moments in his work – the dying mother brushing her hair in “The Puppetmaster,” Jack Kao (Mr. Hou’s best actor) going through the car wash in “Goodbye South, Goodbye,” the shot of the corridor leading to the hospital entrance in “City of Sadness,” almost any given scene in “Flowers of Shanghai” – that have the hard luminosity and patience of a Hopper or a Vermeer.

Several Hou works are now available on DVD, and I’m glad of it. But you should make the trip down to Anthology to see these films, which fill the big screen like few ever have.

Until February 13 (32 Second Avenue, at 2nd Street, 212-505-5181).