One of the joyful delusions shared by successive generations of film students is that though most aesthetic discoveries have deep roots in the work of yesteryear, they nevertheless spring fully formed from the bright young minds of today. This is particularly the case with nascent filmmakers working in the cinematic avant-garde (for want of a better word). The pleasures of discovering and applying the tools of filmic expression for abstract, non-narrative reasons can sometimes blind a hungry mind to the fact that any joining of two shots marks the entrance to a pathway leading back to cinema’s beginning. Whenever film students romance unease, irony, or postmodern self-reflexivity by mating discarded footage to narratively irrelevant yet accidentally evocative audio, they are saluting the Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett, whether they know it or not.

Lipsett (1936-86), who is the subject of an essential retrospective at Anthology Film Archives this weekend, as well as an excellent documentary, “Remembering Arthur,” by the late filmmaker’s friend and colleague Martin Lavut, also running at Anthology, did not invent the collage film, but he came close to perfecting it.

Like the American experimental movie artist Bruce Conner, much of Lipsett’s core work was composed of discarded fragments of other films, set to a soundtrack of similarly purloined and reconfigured audio that was originally recorded by other moviemakers for other movies. No less a fan than Stanley Kubrick called Lipsett’s Oscar-nominated 1961 debut short film, “Very Nice, Very Nice,” “one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack that I have ever seen.” Kubrick even invited Lipsett to create the trailer for “Dr. Strangelove,” an offer the Montreal native declined.

“In terms of understanding the power of sound and picture relationships,” George Lucas offers in an interview that opens “Remembering Arthur,” “there’s no one better than Arthur Lipsett.” The determinedly alienating editorial textures of Mr. Lucas’s 1971 debut feature, “THX 1138,” evoked Lipsett’s work directly. Labeling a prominently featured jail cell aboard the Death Star in the first “Star Wars” film 21-87, the title of Lipsett’s third short work, was an even more specific, though subtler, tribute.

But to assess and appreciate Lipsett’s films entirely on formal terms is to undercut the passion and poetic vision that is in evidence everywhere in his work. Clinically modernist and postmodernist modes of expression have a particular allure for those uncomfortable with unabashed emotion and the potential perils of empathy. But as nominally abstract as Lipsett’s movies could appear on the surface, the filmmaker used his ruthless command of the mysterious collusion of successive frames of film and inches of soundtrack to make cinema the purest art form in which to bare a heart and soul in profound unease and fatal torment. His alternately furious and graceful fusions of word and image were denouncements of the dehumanizing turn that humanity had taken, in Lipsett’s estimation, during the 1950s and ’60s. He used the cutting room to put consumerism, religious dogma, suffocating mass-media bullying, and popular culture’s cancerous mutation under the knife via the flickering pictures and purling noises and voices he juxtaposed.

In time, the “hyper-anxious William Blake of cinema,” as one late-’60s journalist dubbed him, turned his razor-edge sensibility on himself. “N-Zone” (1970) and “Strange Codes” (1972) were autobiographical self-dissections of the filmmaker’s own deepening depression and anxiety. Dogged by lapsing mental health and hobbled by the same obsessive genius and sensitivity that made his work so remarkably lucid and influential, Lipsett took his own life in 1986, not yet 50 years old.

One can find traces and echoes of Lipsett’s uniquely dexterous grasp of editorial mechanics and film grammar almost anywhere. If you’ve seen the mordant indoctrination film-within-a-film in Alan J. Pakula’s classic paranoia fest “The Parallax View,” or Barney Gumble’s Springfield Film Festival grand prize-winning short film “Pukahontas” in the 1995 “A Star Is Burns” episode of “The Simpsons,” you’ve already had a secondhand sip from Arthur Lipsett’s creative well. Anthology’s retrospective and Mr. Lavut’s highly personal portrait are a reminder of just how unfathomably deep and despairingly dark those waters have remained.

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