Stanley Kubrick’s steely control of motion, sound, and image has made his films boilerplate texts for nascent auteurs and made him synonymous with uncompromising and valedictory cinematic excellence. His work (and that of his acolytes) has probably spawned more film degrees than any other director. And yet Kubrick’s mid-20th century ascent, not from film school to a film career, but from photojournalist to documentarian to independent filmmaker, is a career path that his contemporary admirers in college movie factories all over the world have clearly forsworn.

If the ultimate film-school director never went to film school, against whose standards did he measure his own work? Like John Frankenheimer, Sam Peckinpah, and other Hollywood mavericks of his generation, Kubrick was a movie buff long before he was a filmmaker. The director of “2001” and “Barry Lyndon” granted fewer and fewer interviews as his budgets, conceptual audacity, and cachet grew. Nevertheless, early in his career he bowed low to one influence in particular. “Highest of all I would rate Max Ophuls,” Kubrick told an inquirer in the 1950s. The cinema of Ophuls (1902–57), Kubrick said, “possesses every possible quality.”

Ophuls’s influence on Kubrick is clear when it comes to camera movement. “A shot that doesn’t call for tracks is agony for dear old Max,” quipped James Mason, an actor tasked with keeping up with Ophuls’s intricately choreographed and emotionally evocative camera moves in the 1949 American thrillers “Caught” and “The Reckless Moment.” Kubrick’s relentless backtracking and crabbing in “The Killing” and “Paths of Glory,” his point-of-view suicide attempt in “A Clockwork Orange,” his tricycle prowl in “The Shining,” and his marching dolly in “Full Metal Jacket” all evoked — if not aped — Ophuls’s elegant camera gymnastics.

Starting tomorrow, BAMcinématek will present 12 features directed by Kubrick’s aesthetic muse and cinema’s maestro of mise-en-scène. Though Ophuls (who was born Maximillian Oppenheimer and renamed himself in deference to his family’s distaste for show business) began and ended his life in Germany, his career spanned the moviemaking globe. Theater experience in Vienna, first as an actor and then as a director, led him to Berlin during the UFA studio’s flush of cinematic creativity between the world wars. Ophuls’s UFA triumph, the ornate and biting 1933 romantic gem “Liebelei,” was released to international acclaim — minus its director’s name in the credits. Ophuls, who was persona non grata in Hitler’s Berlin, left Germany before the Jewish origins that cost him a title card had the chance to claim his life.

“Emigration was no hardship,” Ophuls wrote in his posthumously published memoir. “It was an outing.” Though he made films in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Hollywood (where his name was further modified to “Opuls”), and France again after World War II, Ophuls repeatedly returned home to a personal onscreen vision of belle époque Europe no matter where he was shooting. His gorgeously photographed tragic fable of 1948, “Letter From an Unknown Woman,” focused his miniaturist’s eye for detail and his novelist’s sensitivity for character in turn-of-the-century Vienna (actually a Paramount back lot) that was half Strauss waltz, half Arthur Schnitzler morality play.

Though lushly lit and decorated from start to finish, “Letter From an Unknown Woman” (which kicks off BAM’s retrospective in a new print showing for one week) is neither a dithering, costumed, rearward glance, nor a manipulative, bodice-ripping meltdown. Instead of going over the top, Ophuls used a personal reminiscence, revealed in flashback, to explore the unfortunate intersection of lust, art, and delusional nostalgia with heartbreaking clarity and symphonic lyricism. “The course of our lives can be changed by such little things,” observes Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), the victim, heroine, and ultimate survivor of “Letter From an Unknown Woman.” “I know now that nothing happens by chance. Every moment is measured; every step is counted.”

In 1950’s “La Ronde,” based directly on a Schnitzler play, Ophuls measured and counted the links forged in a chain of desire with the same subtle deference to the female point of view as in the rest of his core films. No matter what country he worked in or what era he depicted, Ophuls, as the cinema scholar Chris Fujiwara wrote in 2000, remained “concerned with how women are looked at, and how they control their own images or are forced into images that tyrannize them.” In 1949’s “The Reckless Moment,” Joan Bennett’s iron-willed supermother resists her daughter’s blackmailers only to lose her heart. In 1952’s “Le Plaisir,” a group of carefree French prostitutes is reduced to tears as a church service reminds them of their lost innocence.

With the possible exception of Japan’s similarly female-inclined camera poet Kenji Mizoguchi, no filmmaker before or since Max Ophuls has devoted as much imagination and technical ingenuity to spin the tatters of vulnerability and the shreds of regret that love and life guarantee into evanescent beauty in motion.

Through December 18 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).