Choreographers and filmmakers may share a love of rhythm, of patterns in space, of movement, of music, of visual metaphor. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to put dance on film. Few filmmakers can suggest the three-dimensionality of dance, and few dance-makers can successfully choreograph for camera. The artists who can elegantly marry the two forms are rare enough to merit their own festival—the Dance on Camera Festival, now in its 35th year.

On Wednesday, the Dance on Camera Festival returns to Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater for the 11th straight year. Within the mix of filmed dances, documentaries, and art films are 13 New York premieres and a handful of classics. All of the films are rarely screened, and few are readily available on DVD.

Herewith, a guide to some of the highlights of the festival, which runs from January 3 to 7 and January 12 to 13. All of the films mentioned below screen at the Walter Reade Theater; some share a program with other short films. (For a complete schedule, see www.filmlinc.org.)

“INVITATION TO THE DANCE” January 13 at 4 p.m. Gene Kelly’s glittery, dialogueless movie is a straightforward anthology of three dances (including a Hanna-Barbera-animated fantasy) strung end on end. MGM considered it unmarketable in its day; today, it’s a fascinating dinosaur, complete with performances by the Ballets Russes dancers Tamara Toumanova and Igor Yousketvitch.

“SERGE LIFAR MUSAGÈTE” January 3 at 8:30 p.m., January 4 at 1 p.m. French director Dominique Delouche’s documentary about the legendary French-Russian dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar (1905–1986) includes rare footage of Lifar, his colleagues, and the dancers of the Paris National Opera Ballet.

“GEORGIANS IN THE MARIINSKY” with “ALBERTO & CARMEN” January 7 at 7 p.m., January 12 at 6:15 p.m. A 2003 documentary explores contributions to the former Kirov Ballet by Georgian artists — among them the designer Simon Visaladze, the dancer Vakhtang Chaboukiani, and the young Georgi Balanchivadze (later, George Balanchine). In the second film, “Alberto and Carmen,” Cuban-born choreographer Alberto Alonso reminisces about creating his (initially controversial) 1967 “Carmen” for Maya Plisetskaya of the Bolshoi. Ms. Plisetskaya and her husband, Rodion Shchedrin (who arranged Bizet’s score into “Carmen Suite”) are among those interviewed.

“JOSEPHINE BAKER: BLACK DIVA IN A WHITE MAN’S WORLD” January 3 at 6:15 p.m., January 12 at 1 p.m. A new documentary by the German filmmaker Annette von Wangenheim chronicles the life and times of the cabaret legend.

“MOVING BODIES AFTER MAYA DEREN” January 7 at 4 p.m. Robert Haller of Anthology Film Archives curated this retrospective, which amounts to a two-hour crash survey of dance films shaped primarily by the needs of cinema. Spanning five decades and 13 short films, the program includes works by Deren, Pooh Kaye, Kenneth Anger, Amy Greenfield, and Ed Emschweiler, among others.

“DIDO AND AENEAS: A DANCED OPERA” January 13 at 2 p.m. For those who missed the Mark Morris Dance Group’s brilliant restaging of this Morris classic last spring, the screening of the director Barbara Willis Sweete’s acclaimed 1996 filmed version is a must-see. Even for those who caught last spring’s “Dido,” the film offers a rare chance to see the dance performed in its original form — that is, with Mr. Morris (now largely retired from dancing) playing the dual roles of Dido and the Sorceress. After the screening, Mr. Morris will join Ms. Willis Sweete and his biographer, Joan Acocella of the New Yorker, for an onstage discussion.

“FORSYTHE AND CUNNINGHAM” January 4 at 3:30 p.m., January 12 at 8:30 p.m. Two films from 2006 share the bill: Thierry de Mey’s collaboration with William Forsythe, “One Flat Thing, Reproduced,” and Charles Atlas’s “Biped,” which skillfully adapts the 1999 Merce Cunningham multimedia performance of the same name for the screen.

“LUCINDA CHILDS” January 4 at 8:30 p.m., January 6 at 3 p.m. Patrick Bensard’s 2006 documentary follows the Judson Dance Theater pioneer — and prolific opera choreographer — as she works with the Ballet de l’Opéra National du Rhin. Both director and choreographer will attend the screening.

“TERPSICHORE’S CAPTIVES I & II” January 5 at 3:30 p.m., January 7 at 1 p.m. The Russian filmmaker Efim Reznikov provides two contrasting profiles of the ballet dancer Natasha Balakhnecheva. In the first, recorded at the Perm Ballet School in 1995, the young dancer spars with the school’s director; in the second, filmed ten years later, she leaves ballet to become a pupil of Bill T. Jones.

“CAMBODIAN STORIES” January 5 at 1 p.m., January 6 at 1 p.m. One of several festival documentaries about choreographers working in extraordinary contexts, this film, produced by the Japanese dance artists Eiko and Koma, chronicles their attempts to teach their unique, glacial style of movement to the children of a Cambodian painting school. (The dance that grew out of the collaboration was performed by the artists and their students at the Asia Society last May.)

“THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES” January 5 at 6:15 p.m. The film itself dances in this 1969 imagistic classic by the Armenian-Russian director Sergei Paradjanov. Banned in the Soviet Union, this fine-art treatment of the spiritual journey of medieval Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova was admired by the likes of Fellini, Godard, and Antonioni.