There are as many ways to experience a film by James Benning as there are moments in a day.

Take for example his 2004 film “13 Lakes.” Consisting solely of 10-minute shots of individual lakes across the American West, the film is writ in shifts of light, water, and wind, and in the play of colors and textures, of halcyon silence and ambient sound. A stunning, invigorating chronicle of the moment-to-moment poetry in natural landscapes, it’s like a Constable painting come to life — mesmerizing from the first shot of a gathering waterborne sunrise over Jackson Lake, to the wine-dark waves of the closer, Lake Oneida.

Tonight, this masterpiece, with two other recent films — 2004’s “Ten Skies” and 2005’s “One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later” — by the extraordinary filmmaker, begins a week-long run at Anthology Film Archives. Provocative and yet deeply intuitive, “13 Lakes” and its companion, “Ten Skies,” strike you with the primal force of their beauty and trigger reflection. “One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later,” which revisits the people and locations of Mr. Benning’s 1977 Milwaukee chronicle “One Way Boogie Woogie,” becomes a deeply personal entry in so-called structuralist filmmaking.

In all three cases, the method is similar: serial, varied, attentive, and rewarding attention. But creating such atmospheric works also demands a lot of a director who is sensitive to the potential of his subject. The far-flung “13 Lakes” saw Mr. Benning journeying thousands of miles — and then required further aesthetic assembly.

“I ordered the shots according to color and sound and movement and action,” Mr. Benning said from his home on the West Coast of editing the film. “But if you consider the amount of possibilities for 13 shots, there are 13 factorial ways — over a million ways to do that.”

It’s an endearingly precise view of the rigors of making art, reminding one of the 65-year-old filmmaker’s degree in mathematics (earned on a baseball scholarship). Yet “13 Lakes” and “Ten Skies” use the bounded means of a fixed camera to open up uncontainable vistas and events. One cloud-ridden lake is glassily placid until, partway through the 10 minutes, droplets of rain begin falling. Another unforgettable view of ochre mountains mirrored in the water, astonishing in its still symmetry, is soon punctured by the sound of distant gunshots.

Indeed, the natural canvases engage the viewer in “reading” images anew. Each shot records and relates the passage of time, the vicissitudes of weather, the phenomena of a living world. In the horizonless shots of “Ten Skies,” which act like portals to the heavens, “the sky is a function of the landscape itself,” Mr. Benning said. “When clouds are moving upwards and coming off the side of a hill, it’s because there’s a brush fire creating its own weather system.”

The vertiginous beauty of this more abstract, challenging work features, instead of ambient noise, a sound design fabricated seamlessly from Mr. Benning’s past soundtracks.

Behind each landscape also lies history. Included in the 13 lakes is the Salt Sea, which was accidentally created in 1903 by an overloaded irrigation system; the Red Lake’s pristine looks are the result of years of local American Indian resistance to incursions by outsiders. In the latter case, two Chippewa men threatened even Mr. Benning, although the tense memory is balanced by a later encounter with Chippewa women and children merrily cavorting at a store down the road.

“There I had the exact opposite experience — joy of life, happiness. I always tend to think that those kind of things, even though they aren’t in the films, they are,” he said of the story behind the image.

Like the unique landscapes he renders, Mr. Benning has seen a rich span of experience. Born in Milwaukee to a working-class family, he followed his studies by working with migrant workers in Colorado and the poor in the Ozarks before moving on to film, working for a stretch in New York in the 1980s. The director of upward of 15 features, including the highly regarded Los Angeles trilogy, he now teaches at the California Institute for the Arts.

“One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later,” therefore, marks a fitting third film to Anthology’s series, grounded as it is in autobiographical memory and sensation. Sixty shots of industrial and residential blocks and lots in Mr. Benning’s hometown circa 1977 were restaged almost three decades on. Buildings disappear or see their boisterous ’70s colors grayed over with paint, pavement, or age. As always, sound design plays a role: Mr. Benning reuses the 1977 audio track in the later film, triggering a layering of memories.

Comparatively fast-paced at two hours (one minute per shot), the self-reflective film features silly, reality-bending bits of humor (starring friends and family) and recalls the work of fellow avant gardist Michael Snow. In one shot, a friend with a dog appears to cross left to right multiple times, an illusion accomplished by his doubling back behind the camera during the shot.

Though often viewed as a record of the inexorable aging of an American city, the compound work stirs primarily personal feelings in the filmmaker, and in ways not immediately apparent. Mr. Benning does express sadness about how the working-class neighborhood of his childhood is marked these days by dead-end jobs and racial prejudice. But when asked what changes captured by the film surprised him most, he does not offer any commentary on urban blight.

“The most surprising was how much my friends had aged, and to realize you never see yourself as aging like that,” he said. “Time has this boomerang to it.” The man with the dog, for example, who leads a horse in the newer film, was too ill to restage the trick exactly. His gradual progress across the screen, tugging the horse when it pauses to nibble weeds, takes on a touching poignancy.

For Mr. Benning, the chronicling of time, and the investigation of space, continues apace with his latest projects. “Casting a Glance,” which will make its premiere at a German festival this fall, is a study of Robert Smithson’s famed “Spiral Jetty” earthwork at Utah’s Great Salt Lake. And in the succinctly titled “RR,” Mr. Benning trains his camera on 43 trains across the nation, holding each shot for as long as the train takes to go by. It’s a fitting subject for a medium that began by stunning audiences with footage of a train pulling into a station, and for a filmmaker whose work re-instills that old sense of wonder at cinema, and the world.

Through June 21 (32 Second Ave. at 2nd Street, 212-505-5181).