In a 1970 cover story profile, Time magazine branded Elliot Gould “the standard bearer for the Western World’s hung-up generation.” Dated jargon notwithstanding, for the first half of the 1970s, the actor did indeed personify the Nixon-era antihero in all its three-dimensionally neurotic glory.

Beginning today, BAMcinématek will honor Elliott Gould with a 10-film retrospective of the actor’s essential on-screen work titled “Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age.” The BAM retrospective, which begins with a weeklong run of Robert Altman’s smash 1970 hit “M*A*S*H,” showcases Mr. Gould’s exceptional facility for exploring the contested middle ground between the polarizing issues and themes that defined America and Hollywood during the 1970s. He wasn’t a matinee idol, but in a heavily introspective era of cinema, he delivered to audiences a mirror to their own anxieties with a unique blend of gravity and humility.

“Some of the time I have a problem with authority,” Mr. Gould said recently on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “I almost always have.” And yet Mr. Gould looks back on his New York roots and his central position in one of the richest creative periods in American filmmaking with a sense of emotion and circumspection that makes him seem more a pilgrim than a rebel.

Though he’s invariably identified as having been born in Brooklyn, “I was conceived in Far Rockaway,” Mr. Gould said. “I have really good recall. I don’t remember the conception, but I go very far back.”

Mr. Gould, born Elliott Goldstein in 1938, is nevertheless a son of Brooklyn. “I was brought up in Brooklyn, yeah,” he confirmed before ticking off his childhood address on Olympic Parkway (pre-ZIP-code single-digit postal code and all) as if reciting it to a police officer.

“I went to P.S. 247, which was a very good experience,” he continued. In terms of his subsequent career, it was an educational turn in another borough that proved more auspicious. “I went to Professional Children’s School in Manhattan,” Mr. Gould said, “where I sort of was brought into song and dance.”

The nascent actor’s journey to the spotlight was not one he initiated himself. “It wasn’t my idea,” he said. “I used to like to listen to the radio, and I still love going to the movies when I can. But by the time I was 8 or 9, I was extremely withdrawn and inhibited and shy and repressed, and that’s when I was taken to this song and dance school.” Musical theater, Mr. Gould recalled, became a kind of extrovert therapy. “I thought: ‘Well, since I didn’t know how to communicate, if I memorized routines, perhaps I could communicate through that which I had memorized.'”

Broadway success sent Hollywood calling. But the daunting technique and discipline of acting for the camera presented a personal challenge of its own. “In 1978, when I was working in England on a fairly good remake of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces, ‘The Lady Vanishes,’ the great Angela Lansbury said to me at the studio at Pinewood, ‘I never know where the camera is,'” Mr. Gould recalled. “And I thought, ‘that’s hard for me to believe and hard for me to accept.’ I always know where the camera is in relation to the lighting and in relation to rehearsing and having to hit marks.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Gould made peace with that knowledge early in his film career. “I was able to find my first objective relationship with the camera on my third film, which was ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,’ with Paul Mazursky,” he said. Pressed to define what he meant by “objective relationship with the camera,” Mr. Gould returned to his Brooklyn childhood. “I couldn’t be objective with mother and father; I couldn’t be objective with myself, I had no objectivity whatsoever. That was abstract to me,” he explained. “But then in ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,’ each of the four characters had a fantasy. My wife was played by Dyan Cannon, and her fantasy was that every man in her mind wanted to dance with her. So Paul Mazursky and [the late actor and screenwriter] Larry Tucker staged a scene on a soundstage at Columbia with 400 male extras and me and Dyan Cannon.”

Alone during a break on the temporarily darkened set dressed to evoke classic Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and ’40s, “I realized that the camera didn’t give me problems,” Mr. Gould said. “I gave me problems! The camera would never lie to me — it simply reports where I am. It was my first objective relationship.”

That relationship continues to this day. “I always know where the camera is, but it’s my friend.”

On the subject of his three-film collaboration with Altman, Mr. Gould described a similar bond of trust. “He just gave me so much room, and I was able to really, really start to play,” Mr. Gould recalled of “M*A*S*H,” his first of three encounters with Altman. “He never was inhibiting.”

That uninhibited collaboration reached its zenith in Altman’s 1973 reworking of Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye,” starring Mr. Gould as private eye Philip Marlowe. Pitched precariously between revisionist vivisection and absolute sincerity, between a suffocating realistic early-70s Los Angeles and the hard-boiled, mean-streets mythology of the silver screen, “The Long Goodbye” is easily one of the finest American films of a very fine movie decade.

“Yeah, that was my favorite for a long time,” Mr. Gould said.

So much so that the actor, who will turn 70 next month, now plans to revisit the role to which, despite a lukewarm reception in first release, he is arguably most closely linked. Raymond Chandler did, after all, write some seven Marlowe novels and nearly as many short stories. “When we were doing ‘The Long Goodbye,’ Bob [Altman] and I talked about it. We felt that we ought to do one every other year,” Mr. Gould said.

“I don’t know whether I’ll ever get it produced,” Mr. Gould offered about his current effort to revive a character that the actor brought to life with a vividness rivaling, if not surpassing, Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum’s interpretations. Nevertheless, recent overtures to Chandler’s estate have been cause for optimism. “They’ve given me the rights to one story that I’m interested in,” Mr. Gould said.

Whether or not Mr. Gould is able to shepherd Philip Marlowe back to the screen, the actor, who will introduce screenings of “The Long Goodbye” and 1971’s “Little Murders” next week at BAM, remains upbeat about both his film past and future.

“I have no complaints,” he said. “It’s great to be able to get to here and still have more work on the horizon.”

Through August 21 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).