Beginning today, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cinématek will screen six films by the American director Robert Aldrich (1918–83) in a week-long retrospective titled “Overlooked Aldrich.” With paradigmatic hit films such as the gothic horror whirlwind “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane” (1962) and the anti-hero orgy “The Dirty Dozen” (1967) to his credit, Aldrich sold plenty of tickets in his day. He also enjoyed critical admiration from the likes of Manny Farber, who praised the director’s “instinct for the type of filigree electricity that makes a film.”

At the time of his sudden death, however, Aldrich hadn’t struck box office gold for close to a decade, and while his critical cache in Europe was strong at the time, it no longer extended across the Atlantic to America. “My father felt that he never was received in this country as a filmmaker,” said Aldrich’s daughter, Adell Aldrich, who will introduce several of the screenings in BAM’s series.

Aldrich’s path to auteurhood began as a first assistant director (a high-pressure and highly skilled job, roughly the movie equivalent to serving as first officer on a battleship bridge in combat) for Jean Renoir, William Wellman, Joseph Losey, and Charles Chaplin, among many others. “After working with these men,” Aldrich told an interviewer shortly before his death, “you either know what you want to do, or you know nothing at all.”

Both a powerfully gifted storyteller who singlehandedly redefined the war, Western, horror, and detective film genres, and a cunning visual stylist who meticulously planned and executed his films with precision and budgetary thrift, Aldrich might rightly be called a filmmakers’ filmmaker. Indeed, his magnum opus, 1955’s “Kiss Me Deadly,” has been referenced and lauded in films by fellow members of the cinema individualist elite — Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, Takeshi Miike, Quentin Tarantino, Alex Cox, Jean-Luc Godard, and Martin Scorsese.

But perhaps his most profoundly personal filmmaking influence was on his family. Adell Aldrich and her siblings were raised in a household where moviemaking and homemaking were intertwined. “My father had a very strong work ethic,” Ms. Aldrich said. “As a young child I remember that he was up at 4 o’- clock in the morning and the house rules were from four to six you just didn’t disturb dad. Dad was making his shot list for the day.”

But it wasn’t all quiet observation for the Aldrich children. “In the summers we would go to work for our father,” Ms. Aldrich said. “That started at 13.”

In the decades that followed, both Adell and her late brother, William, made those summer jobs permanent. William became a producer and continued to work with this father. Adell only recently retired from a career as a director and as a practitioner of the most Jesuitical of all film set jobs — the script supervisor. Performing the script supervisor’s job of ensuring filmic continuity and coherence during the shooting of a film, no matter how chaotically ordered and disjointed the schedule, is no mean feat. In her debut gig as script clerk on her father’s film, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” it was a baptism of fire. “I did ‘Baby Jane’ when I was 18,” Ms. Aldrich said. “It was an education, to say the least.”

Robert Aldrich was a pioneer in the use of multiple cameras to photograph a single scene. Now a common practice, in 1962 shooting with two cameras simultaneously was unusual. “The ‘A’ camera would film the master [an angle capturing the entire scene’s action] and the ‘B’ camera would be the close-up of Betty Davis or the close-up of Joan Crawford,” Ms. Aldrich explained. “The amount of film that he used was very, very high,” and doubled his daughter’s workload. “He was always rolling two cameras from ‘Baby Jane’ on,” she said, “and it was always very difficult.”

Her father, a nephew to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the grandson of Rhode Island Senator Robert Aldrich, left Ms. Aldrich a different sort of legacy than the one his powerful family had in mind. It’s a legacy that Adell has in turn passed on. “My middle daughter’s a script supervisor, just like I was,” she said. “My youngest daughter is a makeup artist, my son is a key rigging grip, my husband is one of the most famous grips in L.A., my son-in-law is a grip, and my daughter-in-law is an assistant director and a producer.”

Since retiring from the on-set side of the movie business, Adell Aldrich has plunged into the morass of rights, financial, and archival issues that her father’s death also left behind. Though he made what he called “bread and butter pictures” to stay afloat, many of Robert Aldrich’s best and most personal films were independently financed. Some, such as the visually phenomenal and both politically and technically prescient thriller “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” (part of BAM’s retrospective) remain unavailable on home video. Adell Aldrich also has plans in the works to make a documentary film about her father’s life and films. She has recently presented his work at film festivals in Turin, Italy, Gijon, Spain, and at Lincoln Center.

And the Rockefeller legacy? “I have a Stuben glass bowl that was sent to me by John D. from my first wedding,” Ms. Aldrich said. “That’s literally the only thing I have from the Rockefellers.” The treasure she has and will share with BAM’s audience for the next week is something infinitely more valuable and rare — the polished and expert creations of one of America’s greatest maverick filmmakers, one whose positive influence is still gathering momentum 24 years after his death.

Through July 3 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).