Michelangelo Antonioni has created films that are formative cinema – shaping the audience as much as the director shapes his deep-focus images and elliptical narratives. His eloquent, dynamically framing camerawork encloses ambivalent characters while opening up worlds of poetic yet alienating beauty. It’s a sense of absence and disconnect that can, in spite of itself, be rather seductive, especially in the company of idle rich protagonists. It’s not small wonder that cinephilia had its heyday along with Mr. Antonioni’s.

One of the director’s late works, the 2004 short “Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo,”consists of the director contemplating the 16th-century statue of Moses by another Michelangelo (Buonarroti). It’s a meeting of equals, as Mr. Antonioni – now pushing 94 – has become something of a monument. He is art cinema’s Colossus of modernism, a byword for contemporary alienation, not to mention the masterful creator of some of the most indelible vistas to hit the silver screen.

The short, as well as nearly the entirety of the director’s oeuvre, will screen in a meaty retrospective opening today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It’s one thing to put il maestro on a pedestal in the fusty cine-museum, and quite another to stare down his visionary works in living celluloid – the gaping spaces (an island, an abandoned village) and dead time of “L’Avventura,” the grainy stolen photographs and transformation of a catatonic concert crowd into a rabid mob in “Blow-Up,” or Monica Vitti, anywhere, slouching toward nothingness in the lines of his compositions.

One of the cornerstones of the 1960s art house, “Blow-Up” opens the BAM series with a week-long run (June 7 to 13) in a new print struck for its 40th anniversary. A raffish London photographer (David Hemmings) slides from jetting about town, leaving fashion models in his wake, into obsessively and hopelessly scrutinizing some snapshots he took that may show a murder. In addition to the perk of its 1960s London milieu (including a Yardbirds performance), the film is a succinct and engaging puzzle of digression and reflexivity. The photographer enlarges his photos, stringing them across his spacious apartment, in search of … something. It’s even a little entertaining to see his initial scornful cool dissolve into confusion, but that’s as far as Mr. Antonioni goes: No detective story gets solved, the photographer does not reform himself; instead, the director leaves his audience suspended in a space of uneasy reflection.

Of course, Mr. Antonioni’s defining success actually came earlier, with the stone-cold trilogy of “L’Avventura” (June 17), “La Notte” (June 18), and “L’Eclisse” (June 24), making for a few June weekends of major league anomie. The flagship is “L’Avventura” (1960), with an absence at its center that no one knows how to fill, after some comfortably off vacationers lose someone during a yacht trip to an island. The story drifts likewise with the depressive aimlessness of one vacationer, Anna (Ms. Vitti). Too soon she is ignobly pursued by the missing woman’s lover, out of sadness, desperation, or maybe a boredom that only lust can clarify. The extraordinarily deep compositions of the island and later the Italian countryside through which Anna (and her lover) wander seem to swallow up the protagonists, as well as isolate their every hesitation.

Mr. Antonioni’s attempt to turn this gaze on America, “Zabriskie Point” (June 23), was panned on its 1970 release here as a shallow take on post-’60s ferment. This tale of a young man and woman in California eventually crossing their respective rebellious paths in a cinematographically convenient desert is certainly flawed. But the defensive note in the criticism ignores the movie’s robust take on youthful idealism.The perceived shallowness belongs to the characters, in the gulf between thought and action, crystallized by the moment when the young man reaches for a gun to shoot a riot cop only to see him shot down by someone else. The film’s much-mocked ending – a gorgeous house explosion slowed down to a lava-lamp wobble and scored to funkadelic rock – pretty much sums up the problem of many a youth revolution, which sure looks cool until something more interesting comes along.

While we’re re-evaluating Mr. Antonioni, it’s worth mentioning the retrospective’s significant effort at sussing out the director’s rarer works and sounding some intriguingly unfamiliar notes.The biggest surprise to most will be his documentary work, from early neorealist-tinted shorts (such as a simple piece on the Po River) to the extraordinary Far East counterpart to “Zabriskie Point,” a highly unusual 31/2 hour 1972 documentary made in China. Shot under Chinese supervision, it’s a necessarily constrained work on daily life, but no such expedition could be banal through the eyes of Mr. Antonioni (who threw himself out of a car to steal certain shots). Other treats include 1950’s “Chronicle of a Love” (June 15), an elliptical early masterpiece of guilt and adultery that has the director’s technical approach down for any who care to look, and the recently re-released 1975 head-scratcher “The Passenger” (June 29), with Jack Nicholson taking on another man’s identity. It was the last of three pictures the director made under an adventuresome MGM contract, if one can imagine such a thing happening now.

Mr. Antonioni’s cinema has had such an influence on alternative idioms of filmmaking that it’s easy to neglect just how much was defined in films such as “L’Avventura” and “Blow-Up.” It’s worth taking a trip back to the source, forgetting for a moment the director’s canonization, and experiencing his cinema of disappearances – the sensual tracings of a world adrift.

Until June 29 (Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).