Theo Angelopoulos has announced that his new film is the first part of a trilogy that will attempt a “poetic summing up of the century that just ended.” Those are some mighty big words, and he’s backed them up with a mighty big movie. Just shy of three hours long, “The Weeping Meadow” is an epic meditation on Greek history from 1919-49 that follows the fates of a young couple (Alexandra Aidini and Nikos Poursanidis) from childhood exile through, well, everything: romance, parenthood, the tribulations of war, natural disaster, imprisonment, expatriation to America.

But mostly what it’s about are thick slabs of cinematography: elaborately orchestrated long shots that unravel the landscape with sinuous self-importance. The effect can be grand; an early shot introducing us to the characters’ coastal village manages a dozen neat feats of telescoping distance, shifting scale, metamorphic point of view. So that’s what an animated Bruegel looks like.

Regrettably, it all comes down to empty pictures, or, to follow Mr. Angelopoulos’s terminology, empty poetry. The “poetic” mode of “The Weeping Meadow” consists of lofty rhetoric poured over narrative and intellectual sketch work. If this is poetry, it hasn’t learned the modernist lessons of concision and concentration. The movie isn’t poorly written; it’s barely written at all.

Contrast the lack of affect in “The Weeping Meadow” to Jia Zhangke’s “Platform,” another imposing historical meditation rendered through highly structured long shots, but one alert to textures of character and feeling. Or the films of Tarkovsky, where the endlessly roving eye serves as the extension of an intelligence latching onto the specificity of each thing it encounters (if the specifics entail certain opacities and ambiguities, their degree is registered.)

Things in Mr. Angelopolous’s universe are generalized beyond all meaning. “The Weeping Meadow” is upscale spectacle, but no more substantive than a low-brow spectacle like “Transporter 2.”

Halfway through the story, the village is wiped out by flood. It happens off screen, in the middle of the night; we wake up with the characters to disaster. Red tile rooftops appear to float in the placid aftermath, like fall leaves scattered on the surface of a pond. Currents of blood swirl in the green water. Formations of black boats carry blackclad villagers to the nearby shore, propelled at a funeral pace by the solemn, steady labor of the oarsmen. It’s a very pretty calamity.

This sequence would be impressive in any context. In the wake of Katrina, however, such images penetrate the imagination from unexpected angles, posing unexpected questions. The mind can’t help but struggle to connect them meaningfully to events outside the theater. That they fail to do so points to the essential hollowness of “The Weeping Meadow,” its sacrifice of intelligible thought on the grand altar of abstraction.

Is it absurd to expect a Greek filmmaker examining his nation’s past to say something about a contemporary American tragedy he couldn’t possibly have anticipated? Perhaps, but Mr. Angelopoulos’s ostentatious style invites (but doesn’t reward) the most demanding engagement from its viewer.

There is, moreover, a recent and illuminating precedent for the uncanny correspondence of film images to real world disaster. The first movie I saw after September 11 was “Donnie Darko,” a moody pastiche of sci-fi, satire, and 1980s suburban period piece. Five minutes into the story, a jet engine falls from the sky, shattering the Darko residence. The hypersensitive narrative that followed perfectly reflected the mood of New York in those days: tortured introspection, melancholy vertigo, a sense of reality slipping off the rails.

The pained, prophetic “Donnie Darko” afforded a strange sort of succor. The flood images of “The Weeping Meadow” embrace the viewer in nothing but their own virtuosity.

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Jem Cohen practices a different kind of poetry: agile, discrete, resolutely present tense. Many years in the making, his experimental narrative “Chain” grafts the story of two women into a montage of alienated consumerism: parking lots, shopping malls, theme parks, office suites, cheap motels, chain stores. One part depressed travelogue, one part cine-essay on modern malaise, the result is a kind of low-fi, globalized “Safe.”

Miho Nikaido stars (if that’s the word) as a Japanese executive for a theme park company engaged in researching the American landscape. On the site of an abandoned steel factory, she sees the potential for roller coasters.

Mira Billotte plays a destitute young woman eking out a living (if that’s the word) on the margins of shopping mall culture. She feels conspicuous hanging out with no intention of buying anything, and can sense the eyes of mall security on her. But after finding a cell phone and pretending to talk on it, she notices that people stop paying attention.

Mr. Cohen builds a framework for his documentary images around such details. Narrative is not his forte; the women’s stories are less interesting than they way he cuts them into the larger picture. Brilliantly edited, “Chain” compels through its rapt fascination with space and texture, saying all it needs to with a mute presentation of resonant things: synthetic carpets, air-conditioned lobbies, abandoned constructions, expanses of freeway.

Contemplating such ugliness may be a predictable move for a progressive artist, but Mr. Cohen isn’t interested in scoring didactic points off the McWorld. Rooted in close observation, “Chain” is no more ironic than it should be.