To judge from the wonder that greeted last year’s theatrical release of “Killer of Sheep” after 30 years of relative obscurity, one might have thought that Charles Burnett had been moldering in an attic somewhere since his exceptional 1977 debut feature. A very modest retrospective opening tonight at Anthology Film Archives fills in a few of the blanks with a pair of the director’s television outings, some irresistible shorts, and his two best-known releases, all buttressed by welcome encore presentations of “Killer of Sheep” and 1983’s “My Brother’s Wedding.”

A native of Mississippi who was raised in the Watts section of Los Angeles before attending UCLA film school, Mr. Burnett, now 63, shot “Killer of Sheep” on 16 mm film for his M.F.A. thesis project. Though he harbored no theatrical ambitions for the film, about a soul-weary working-class Watts man and his family and friends, it was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1990 and has essentially been canonized with its recent proper release. More recherché entries in Mr. Burnett’s filmography await extraction (what of, say, “The Annihilation of Fish,” the oldster oddball romance from 1999 starring James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, and Margot Kidder?), but it’s possible here to sketch the outlines of a career. Flummoxing the expectations of a fluid lyrical realism, à la “Killer of Sheep,” Anthology’s sample platter suggests an always thoughtful director eager to experiment with perspective and style in portraying thorny family dynamics and race conundrums and, as always, devoted to the specificities of African-American life in Los Angeles.

“To Sleep With Anger” (1990) was Mr. Burnett’s first feature following a drought in the ’80s after “My Brother’s Wedding” was shown to festivals in a flawed rough cut by impatient German producers. (Anthology will be showing the same director’s cut as last fall’s Milestone Films release.) The film, his third feature and the second-most fully realized of his career, glides with the beguiling mischief of a Deep South rascal (Danny Glover) who galvanizes filial tensions in a Los Angeles home. The hulking grandfather (Paul Butler) falls ill, a prodigal son (Richard Brooks) dodges his family duties and jostles with his responsible brother (Carl Lumbly), and all the latent frustration simmers with their visitor’s bad mojo and growing entourage.

As with “Killer of Sheep” in 1977, there wasn’t much out there quite like “To Sleep With Anger” when it made its debut. The folklore of Southern sayings, storytelling, and superstitions enriches the portrait (the home even features a chicken coop in the backyard). Mr. Burnett, who also wrote the screenplay, tapped deeply into his own memories of growing up in a Watts enclave still rich with preserved tradition and community feeling.

The director’s next theatrical release, “The Glass Shield” (1994), was marred by interference from producers (as was an intervening 1991 television documentary on the immigrant experience that the commissioning Ford Foundation found too grim). Mangled by Miramax, this crime melodrama about a black recruit (baby-faced Michael Boatman) in a white L.A. precinct is grounded by Mr. Burnett’s respect for his characters, but it feels doomed by insistent themes clearly shorn of connective tissue. Still, the characteristically inventive opening — a popheroic comic-book montage — and the film’s hot red-and-blue palette acknowledge the well-trod genre precedent behind the departmental disputes. A decade later, the protagonist’s brush with complicity and betrayal still arouses a visceral sense of entrapment.

Leaping forward to 2003, the Anthology series next features two documentaries that Mr. Burnett directed for PBS, both thoughtfully conceived but with divergent results. “Warming by the Devil’s Fire,” Mr. Burnett’s contribution to Martin Scorsese’s “The Blues” series, is chockablock with soul-tapping music and astonishing archival detail. It’s less a survey of blues pioneers than an encounter with the sex, ironical insight, and skill in the music, all of which come alive with incredible black-and-white performance footage of Bessie Smith, Mississippi John Hurt, and others. Phasing in and out of this live-action photo album are the adventures of a boy detoured from church to the juke joint by his blues-loving uncle (Tommy Hicks). Look out for the sequence on Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose “Precious Memories” opens “To Sleep With Anger,” and whose own sacred-and-profane path is echoed by a character in that movie.

The other TV documentary, “Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property” (2003), intermingles the brutal story of the slave rebellion and its enigmatic leader with the saga of its reception across American eras. Mr. Burnett orchestrates a rolling polyphony of re-enactments, stage interpretations, readings from original texts, and scholarly talking-head pronouncements. Culminating with a curtain-pulling moment in which Mr. Burnett examines his own shoot, the effort sounds better on paper, and wears thin its recurrent theme that history depends on who’s talking.

Of course, most experiments would seem inelegant after “Killer of Sheep” and even “My Brother’s Wedding,” but they’re here, too, plus shorts including “Several Friends” (a kitchen-table sketch for “Killer”) and the powerfully ominous “The Horse” (which plays best with little foreknowledge). For the rest, Anthology’s series does its part to flesh out Mr. Burnett’s range of starting points and ambitions (“If I had a choice, I’d be doing one every day if I could,” he has said). In all, it helps rescue him from narrow expectations after a year of being hoisted up on critics’ shoulders for endless victory laps.

Through February 14 (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).