Like many early filmmakers, René Clair (1898-1981) dreaded the advent of sound — he compared it to being wrenched from a dream. After the talkies arrived, it pained the French director to watch people coming out of a movie: “They were not plunged into that comfortable numbness which a trip to the land of pure images used to bestow on us,” he wrote in 1929. “They were talking, laughing, and humming the last refrain they had heard. They had not lost the sense of reality.”

Clair would make his two greatest films — “A Nous la Liberté” and “Le Million” — two years later, in 1931; ironically, both were musicals with a final chorus practically begging to be whistled all the way home. Yet they are two of the most inventive films of their time, and they remain cherished, despite Clair’s faded prestige, for their effortless fusion of the unmastered new technology (“the monster,” as Clair called it) and the visual flair of the silent era.

On Tuesdays for the next couple months, you can hand it over to the French Institute (also known as the Alliance Française), which is presenting these two Clair films, along with eight others, in “The Surreal Delicacy of René Clair,” a series that began June 5 and runs through July 31.

“A Nous la Liberté” tells the story of two former prison cell-mates who later reunite at a factory; “Le Million” is about two friends chasing a missing lottery ticket and the same girl. Both films offer an escape into a weightless mini-universe unfettered by either the technical constraints of sound or the clunkier attempts at so-called realism of early 1930s cinema.

“A lot of the Clair cachet has to do with the look,” the co-author of “Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design,” Elliott Stein, said. There’s nary a shadow in the tidy, symmetrical spaces designed by the films’ art director, Lazare Meerson — ideal arenas for Clair’s daydreaming heroes and kinetic (and almost always non-dance) choreography. In “Le Million,” Meerson and Clair draped gauze over sets for a hazy, two-dimensional effect — “an illusion of unreality,” in Clair’s words.

Most films of this period look “constipated,” Mr. Stein noted, because primitive microphones severely limited camera movement. But Clair used sound sparingly, and recorded it separately. The freewheeling camerawork of his cinematographer, Georges Périnal, lends an extra sense of helter-skelter to “A Nous la Liberté” in particular, a film with an anarchist bent. The hero, a starry-eyed naif, is flummoxed by industrialized society, and chaos triumphs at regular intervals: at a fancy dinner, in the factory yard, and — in a sequence borrowed (or plagiarized, as Clair’s producers alleged) by Charlie Chaplin for “Modern Times” in 1936 — on the assembly line.

But Clair was no anarchist; he was an unabashed populist, and such a perfectionist that he reportedly timed his actors’ movements with a metronome. But his earliest work is a bit different. “Entr’acte” (1924), a gleefully random 22-minute product of the 1920s Paris avant-garde that opened the series last week, shows an almost adolescent impatience with narrative and a keen eye for what looks good on camera. “Paris Qui Dort” (1925) has a bit more story — a handful of people make the city their playground after a professor’s machine puts all of Paris to sleep (with the help of freeze frames) — but this early example of guerrilla filmmaking is really just about having fun with a camera.

There is less pure tomfoolery in Clair’s more mature sound pictures, several of which were made outside France. “Break the News” (1937), a rarely seen comedy that Clair made in Britain, is about two actors (Maurice Chevalier and Jack Buchanan) who stage a murder to generate publicity. In “It Happened Tomorrow” (1944), a reporter receives news of the day’s events — including, eventually, his own death—before they occur. The writer James Agee called it Clair’s “deftiest, prettiest” American film, but some viewers may find Dick Powell’s dapper newspaperman too much of a cheeseball.

Like the world around them, Clair’s postwar films took on a new gravity and nostalgia. In “Les Grands Maneouvres,” (1955), a frivolous courtship in a belle epoque regiment town turns serious when a lothario, played by Gérard Philipe, realizes he’s desperately in love. As in “A Nous la Liberté,” the hero ends up romantically unfulfilled; instead of singing about his freedom, however, Philipe’s lieutenant marches off in stoic regret.

The final film in the French Institute series, “Portes de Lilas” (1957), depicts a love triangle in grim shades that are absent from Clair’s early films. But while the director’s later works suggest he’d had a considerable change of heart, their feints toward tragedy are not always convincing. As Roy Armes observes in his survey of French cinema, the world of Clair’s films “is not really robust enough to encompass death.” And “Les Grands Maneouvres” is a near-perfect example of what François Truffaut immortally branded the “cinéma de qualité”: period setting, manicured mise-enscéne, a lightly worn cynicism easily mistaken for sophistication.

But it is a pleasantly perfumed, superbly acted film. Like many others targeted by Truffaut, “Les Grands Maneouvres” was rather unjustly swept away by the changing tides of the late 1950s and the New Wave, a groundbreaking moment in French filmmaking.

“There’s a tendency to dismiss the French cinema prior to the New Wave, which is absolutely ridiculous,” Bruce Goldstein, the repertory program director at Film Forum, said, adding that he once tried to organize a Clair film series, but couldn’t find enough quality prints. (The French Institute used its ties with the French Ministry of Culture.)

Even in his later films, Clair brought the same zeal to filmmaking as Truffaut and Godard. More important, he stayed agile when a watershed technological advance in film history came lumbering noisily into the studios. The way Clair handled that juggernaut should earn him a spot in cinematic Valhalla.