From Robert Altman to Ingmar Bergman to Tsai Ming-liang, some of the world’s finest filmmakers have worked with digital video, but an exclusively post-celluloid master has yet to arrive. This true digital master is an inevitable, necessary figure, but for the moment an imaginary one.

Which is not to say that digital masterpieces do not exist. Over the next month, the Museum of the Moving Image will present some candidates in a selective survey entitled “Digital Masters.”

The program began last weekend with a pair of forgettable works by indie mannerist Hal Hartley and two much more successful digital-video experiments by Richard Linklater. Shot in handheld, proximate real-time, “Tape” is an underrated, quasi-Dogme exercise. Far more ambitious, “Waking Life” is a minor, unclassifiable landmark in which a “Slacker”-style gabfest shot on Super 8 is overlaid by digital animation. Enthralling or annoying depending on your taste for beatnik metaphysics, “Waking Life” is surely the only cartoon presumptuous enough to discourse on the ontology of the image – and pull it off.

But they’ve saved the best for tomorrow. “Digital Masters” peaks early with a screening of “Russian Ark,” the most significant film yet made on digital video. Alexander Sokurov’s epochal masterpiece consists of a single, unbroken point-of-view shot that wends through a lavish phantasmagoria staged in the Hermitage Museum. Dismissed by some as a “stunt,” and an ideologically suspect one at that, this is no empty exercise in virtuosity but a profound inquiry into the enigmas of contemporary identity.

The narrative, knotted with ambivalence and irony, unspools its dream of historical splendor from an unnamed crisis (of representation, history, memory). We share the gaze of the passive protagonist: This is our crisis, too. Are we in shock, dreaming, dead? Wherever we are, we no longer blink. Montage is optional.

Like Dante, lost in a dark wood, we are led through the dizzying spectacle by a guide: a supercilious French aristocrat whose every utterance is drenched in skepticism. Virgil he is not. If “Russian Ark” is a kind of Divine Comedy, it is written in hypertext. Leaping through centuries at the click of a heel, the pageant of Russian history streams before our eyes. Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven are woven together, inextricably. Dante’s geometric hierarchies have collapsed into the matrix.

Made possible by the storage capacity of a huge custom-built hard drive, “Russian Ark” is above all addressed to the dilemma of contemporary cinematic form. The movie is rife with uncertainties, but it does give us one triumphant answer: This is what cinema can be as it is transformed from a chemical to a digital art. For years we will marvel at the perceptual adventure of the expanding, contracting, labyrinthine single image. One day we will turn our attention to such matters as the subtle interplay between organic and inorganic form in its deepest symbolic depths. Stunt indeed.

Prior Sokurov films had been acclaimed for their otherworldly luminescence – a quality dependent as much on the physical act of projection as photography (Mr. Sokurov’s hermetic lyricism is apt to look precious on DVD). Against such sublime textures of his 35 mm films, the high definition cinematography of “Russian Ark” is merely beautiful, yet it plays equally well either on screen or on television, supporting Jean-Luc Godard’s assertion that video is best understood as a medium for criticism.

Mr. Godard, who has been making video masterpieces for more than a quarter of a century, is regrettably absent from “Digital Masters,” but two of his nouvelle vague colleagues are included in the program. In Agnes Varda’s hugely entertaining cine-essay “The Gleaners and I,” her small digital camera becomes a tool for scavenging sounds and images – gleaning them – from the world.

Eric Rohmer’s “The Lady and the Duke” is a garrulous, claustrophobic, digitally enhanced chamber piece staged during the French Revolution. From time to time, the intractable protagonists exit their sumptuous rooms into wondrously animated tableaux. At once startling and somewhat stultifying, it’s an ambitious period film that uses digital irreality to conjure the imaginative life of a vanished era.

After establishing himself as a formidable poet of 35 mm cinema, Abbas Kiarostami has now fully devoted himself to digital technologies. The results have been mixed. His first step into new media, the under-appreciated documentary “ABC Africa,” exhibited a shrewd grasp of digital video’s contradictory capacities for unmediated representation and total image manipulation. “Ten,” his first feature-length “narrative” on DV, continued to explore this duality in a form so rigorous as to border on parody.

The structural parameters of “Ten” are as strict as any mathematical proposition – and just as dry to contemplate. Mr. Kiarostami affixed a pair of tiny digital cameras to the dashboard of a Tehran taxi and observed with complete apparent detachment 10 conversations between the female driver and her passengers, creating a kind of structuralist “Taxicab Confessions.” The ostensible theme is the “women’s problem” of Iran, but any sociological insight is overwhelmed by the intellectual construct. (For an insufferably pedantic lecture on the digital revolution, try Mr. Kiarostami’s glorified DVD extra “10 on Ten,” opening today at Anthology Film Archives.)

Polar opposite of “Ten’s” verite minimalism, Michael Snow’s “Corpus Callosum” celebrates the infinite malleability of video. Shifting back and forth from an antiseptic office suite to a zany domestic living room, Mr. Snow lets loose a carnival of full-blown digital surrealism. Objects morph, droop, and detonate; people distend like Plastic Man, squeeze into geometric shapes, twist each other in knots. An encyclopedic essay on perception in the digital age, “Corpus Callosum” turns the death of cinema into a frisky, fluorescent hoot.

No survey of digital moviemaking could be complete without a provocation from the Lars von Trier oeuvre. MoMI imports the naughty, uncut version of “The Idiots,” a Dogme-certified opus that’s certifiably nuts. Under the influence of a semi-coherent revolutionary agenda, (Dogme, perhaps?) a commune of faux-retards (i.e. actors) “spazz” amid the posh restaurants and recreational facilities of the Scandinavian bourgeoisie. Funny, freakish, and scathingly skeptical, Mr. Von Trier calls it a film “by idiots about idiots for idiots.” I’d call it a postmodern punk parody of DV “freedom.”

Although partially shot on 16 mm, “The Blair Witch Project” is the landmark DV fright flick, but MoMI closes “Digital Masters” instead with the edgy, less ambitious zombie flick “28 Days Later.” Cinematographer Antony Dod Mantle (“Dogville”) exploits DV motion stutter to nerve-wracking effect, and the hazy, indistinct look of the film suits the apocalyptic setting.

Until March 27 (3601 35th Avenue, at 36th Street, Astoria, 718-784-4520).