“Bless this institution” said one of the many disembodied voices to be heard in Views From the Avant-Garde. Now in its ninth year, the New York Film Festival’s annual sidebar of experimental film has indeed become an institution, at least among the coterie who crowd the marathon screenings. Curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith, “Views,” as everyone calls it, is one of the pre-eminent showcases in the world for such work, and reliably contains some of the best and worst efforts of the entire NYFF.

While I only had time to catch a fraction of the programs, plus the special presentation of Andy Warhol’s “Blue Movie,” the work on view reinforced my impression that much of today’s avantgarde isn’t looking forward but back. Artists young and old plowed the same ground broken by previous generations, stuck in a rut of convention, nostalgia, and homage. This may be the instinctive response of filmmakers grappling with a medium on the verge of extinction.

The handsome formalism of Luke Sieczek’s “Elsewhere” and Jim Jennings’s “Made in Chinatown” fetishize celluloid and the artist as sensitive urban poet. Thorsten Fleisch made a good Brakhage film, Fred Worden made a lousy Godard montage, and a trifle in the style of Ken Jacobs was made, in fact, by Ken Jacobs.

Other work carried a counterproductive taint of the academy and the art world. Despite an evocative use of foreground silhouetting, Scott Stark’s “Driven” was a passe riff on the society of the spectacle. Bobby Abate’s academic “Sylvania” suggests the video equivalent of theoretic jargon. Stephanie Barber’s “Catalog” deployed familiar gallery and performance-art conceits.

Found footage was ubiquitous. Peter Tscherkassky’s “Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine” subjected “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” to the eye-popping derangements of an optical printer – proving, I suppose, that non-narrative can kick ass when it wants to. Enthusiastic applause for Eve Heller’s “Ruby Skin” indicates the avant-garde will never, ever grow tired of found-footage montages, no matter how facile.

Then came a pair of films by the frighteningly gifted Luther Price, and all at once the daring, vitality, and oppositional ethos of the avant-garde reasserted itself with a vengeance. At first, “Nice Biscotts #2” looks no different from a thousand films in the “Ruby Skin” mold: a scratchy bit of pink, dingy found footage chopped and looped according to some vaguely sarcastic principle of appropriation. A documentary point of view pokes around a downscale Southern nursing home accompanied by fragments of a woman’s voice. Several guests are singled out: a pair of middle-aged men sitting in a corridor; a frail patient in bed; a woman who slaps a hand to her forehead; another who turns an intense, accusatory gaze to the camera.

Knotted by rough edits, this exact sequence runs over and over and over. Repetition usually leads to abstraction, but here it becomes a strategy for super-charging emotions that mysteriously well to the surface. The men in the hall could be waiting for Godot. On the sixth peek into her room, the bedridden patient suddenly appears terrified by our intrusion. That slap on the forehead has begun to suggest some inscrutable private agony or slapstick routine. There’s no escape; the isolation is total. Who are these people and what is their malady? Why are they stuck here? Will they ever escape? More upsetting yet, will we?

Mr. Price knows exactly how far to extend the pattern until it starts to open up, flooding the viewer with sadness and pathos. Then he pushes it even further, until the result is unmistakably confrontational. “Nice Biscotts #2” could have been made in response to the social collapse witnessed after Hurricane Katrina. That said, there’s nothing remotely cynical or opportunistic about it. Mr. Price has the extremely rare ability to formulate other people’s images into his own sincere, shattering speech.

“Same Day Nice Biscotts,” its companion piece, is a jag of images shot in and around the home of one of the patients. She stands on the crumbling front porch; a robin takes wing from the roof; a chicken pecks at the base of a tree; twigs, blossoms, and the surface of a pond melt in dissolves. She talks about a grove of dead peach trees. Her face appears briefly in a sliver of superimposition.

The existential tensions of “Nice Biscotts #2” are restrained in “Same Day Nice Biscotts” by its mesmerizing lyricism, only to come raging back near the end of the piece with an image of the narrator in close-up.Faced wrenched in pain, she is sobbing inconsolably. The effect is devastating. Mr. Price is the real deal, and his subtle, resourceful, challenging diptych is one of the finest achievements of the 43nd New York Film Festival.

Rare juvenilia by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“Blissfully Yours,” “Tropical Malady”) proved another Views highlight. Look past the lousy surface of “The Relentless Fury of the Pounding Waves” (the original 16mm print is too delicate to screen, so it was shown on a DVD copy), and you’ll spy the filmmaker’s whole art in embryonic form: the sly melange of documentary and storytelling; experiments with titles and transitions; a beguiling reserve that compels your deep imaginative engagement. “Windows,” a digital video document of strange light phenomena, confirms the artist’s visionary knack for locating magic within the quotidian.

Andy Warhol’s legendary “Blue Movie” considers another magic moment. All but unseen since the late 1960s, the film consists of four half-hour reels. In the first, stunningly beautiful section, a clever Botticelli beauty (Viva) lies in bed with an eager, affable stud (Louis Waldon). They talk and joke and gradually undress. Reel 2 shows real sex in a single shot captured from a fixed position at a respectful distance. On hand to discuss the film and regale the audience with her priceless free associations, Viva could be seen squirming in her chair.

She needn’t have been too embarrassed. Her beauty is exquisite, the film exquisitely tactful. Relaxed and good-natured, “Blue Movie” is the gentlest of Warhol films. It’s funny, too: In the post-coital stretch, the naked lovers discuss Vietnam, vent hipster apathy, and dis New York magazine. The final reel observes the preparation of dinner, a brilliant Manhattan sunset, and a shared shower stoned on marijuana.

“Blue Movie” climaxes, so to speak, with one of those endlessly fascinating moments in a Warhol film when the performers have run out things to say and do, but are obliged by the reel based structure to come up with just a little bit more. Viva and Louis sit in the tub and make animal noises. This would be the last film Warhol would “direct” on his own. “Blue Movie” is a ravishing kiss goodbye to one of the supreme achievements of American cinema – and that magic place known as New York in the 1960s.