The annual Dance on Camera Festival at the Walter Reade Theater is like an old-fashioned cabinet of wonders. As the films come out, one by one, they form a collection as rich in influence as the dance world itself.

In its first few days, the festival offered documentaries about the cabaret legend Josephine Baker, the post-Soviet Perm Ballet School, the contemporary choreographer Bill T. Jones, and Serge Lifar and the Paris Opera Ballet.

But while the documentaries proved consistently worthwhile, director Thierry de Mey’s high style dazzled in the film of William Forsythe’s “One Flat Thing, Reproduced.” The long, low-angle shots of an army of dancers shoving tables across a cavernous, light-infused warehouse were breathtaking — and a welcome antidote to the traditional PBS style of dance filming.

Mr. de Mey’s cuts and angles produced an effect wholly unlike watching dance on a proscenium stage. There was immediacy in the sudden close-ups that communicated the dancers’ punishing physical exertion. (For once, we could literally see them sweat.) Though the close-ups traded off with wideangle shots that displayed the dance’s spatial patterns, the overall effect — stirring, volatile — seemed well worth any sacrifice. This was expert dance filmmaking with a glossy Euro-chic veneer.

On the documentary side, the highlight was the return engagement of Efim Reznikov’s 1995 documentary “Terpsichore’s Captives,” first seen at the festival in 1997. The story unfolds at the famous ballet school in Perm, Russia, shortly after the fall of communism. Over street scenes of grim, gray Perm, the voice of the school’s director, Evgeny Panfilov, says, “Ballet is by nature despotic. Because people are lazy by nature. You can’t force yourself all the time. You need someone to force you.”

In the case of the elegant, darkhaired young ballerina Natasha Balaknecheva, that someone is Lyudmila Pavlovna Sakharova, a 50-something tyrant who slaps the girls hard enough to leave marks. “Does a tree hurt when it’s cut down?” she muses, standing by the barre. “I don’t know,” she continues proudly, “but I cut and I saw.”

Her attempts to trim the imperfections from the teenage Ms. Balaknecheva’s dancing nearly cause her to quit the school. As she rehearses, her cool exterior hides the flood of emotions that race through her under the hail of abuse from Ms. Sakharova’s shouts and hands. But her voiceover tells the true story. In low, defeated tones, she compares her situation to Christ at Gethsemane. If she is to leave ballet, let it be so; if not, she will soldier on — “Thy will, not my will, be done.”

Ms. Balaknecheva, a gifted, gorgeous dancer, has her own notions of how she would like to dance classic roles like Giselle — notions that run contrary to Ms. Sakharova’s rigid interpretations. The constant sparring makes her weep in the evenings in her room, yet she’s unable to become the docile student Ms. Sakharova craves. Intuitively, Ms. Balaknecheva seems to know that she must cling to whatever shards of ego she has left — that her dancing would die if her ego did.

Mr. Reznikov’s camera captures the story with heartbreaking verité intimacy, giving the exterior world a remarkable overlay of interior monologue, much of it in the form of Ms. Balaknecheva reading from her diaries. With its closeups of faces and reluctance to dwell on the dancing for too long, it belongs more to cinema in general than to dance cinema, but its central relationship is presented with aching clarity, and its theme — the submission of ballerinas to authority — is central to the art form, and infrequently discussed.

The occasion for presenting the film again was a new Reznikov documentary, “Terpsichore’s Captives II” (2005), in which the American choreographer Bill T. Jones comes to Russia a decade later to create a piece for Ms. Balaknecheva. One of the first assignments Mr. Jones gives the 20-something Natasha is to stamp one foot and declare, “This is it!” Her struggle to assert herself even in this small act speaks volumes about the way her training has shaped her.

“What’s the difference between keeping someone in a cage, and holding someone?” Mr. Jones asks her. She darts him a sharp look: He’s touched on something important. “That’s a big question for you,” he says quietly.

In contrast, Dominque Delouche’s “Serge Lifar Musagète” is a film tailor-made for dance connoisseurs. Delouche’s latest documentary is stocked with little-seen archival clips and fascinating coaching sessions in which former Lifar pupils teach his dances to modern-day étoiles of the Paris National Opera Ballet. Glossing over Mr. Lifar’s politics — he led the company during the Occupation, and was later accused of being a Nazi sympathizer and banned from the company — the film concentrates instead on the Ukrainian-born Mr. Lifar’s innovations—his lyricism, the sixth and seventh positions and pliés on point, his minimalist “Faun.” Mr. Delouche, a Parisian who has haunted the opera house for six decades, adroitly describes how Mr. Lifar expanded the male role in ballet at the same time as he upgraded the reputation of Paris’s ballerinas from dance hall girls to artists.

At the halfway point, the 2007 Dance on Camera festival can already be pronounced an unqualified success, and next weekend promises more small treasures — including Barbara Willis Sweete’s film of Mark Morris’s masterpiece “Dido and Aeneas” and a rare screening of Gene Kelly’s 1956 “Invitation to the Dance.”

Until January 13 (Lincoln Center, 212-496-3809).