Though he began in paint and canvas, the Bronx-born Lawrence Weiner has, over the course of 40 years, gradually added sculpture, gallery installations, prints, and art books to his résumé. Mr. Weiner’s creations, regardless of the medium, explore the relationship between created object and beholder as much as that between artist and muse.

“The artist may construct the work. The work may be fabricated. The work need not be built,” Mr. Weiner declared in a 1968 manifesto. “Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the condition of receivership.” Challenging, if not outright baffling declarations like this one, and resulting works that exhibit a dogged interest in words and language as much as in color and emotion, have earned the artist, who is currently the subject of a career retrospective at the Whitney entitled “As Far as the Eye Can See,” recognition as one of the prime movers of the late-’60s surge of idea-based gallery work known as conceptual art.

Mr. Weiner has also worked extensively in film and video. As a sidebar to the Whitney show, the often inscrutable fruits of four decades of these filmic labors goes on display at Anthology Film Archives beginning today in a program entitled “Lawrence Weiner: Complete Films and Videos.” Anthology’s retrospective incorporates some 30 projects, ranging from such minute-long short works as 1972’s “Shifted From the Side” and “To and Fro. Fro and To. And To and Fro. And Fro and To,” a playfully transgressive study in exposition and motion, to the feature-length 16 mm film “A First Quarter” (1973) and its unsurprisingly titled 1975 follow-up, “A Second Quarter.”

Just as Mr. Weiner’s early painted propeller studies and “shaped canvas” experiments were informed and influenced by the work of Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, “A First Quarter,” which was produced under the auspices of New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery, owes a stylistic debt to vanguard French filmmaking of the ’60s. Shot on black-and-white video and transferred to film, “A First Quarter” depicts early-’70s New York, from Coney Island to the Lower East Side, in a hypnotic, visually low-fi haze accompanied by a freewheeling jazz score. Over the course of 83 minutes, a “Jules and Jim”-esque trio of Elaine Grove, Mel Kendrick, and Bella Obermaier blithely reads from manuscripts it is in the process of creating. Indeed, everything that happens in “A First Quarter” — including recitations, repetitions, flashbacks, and guerrilla graffiti activities — was ostensibly improvised on the spot.

With strong whiffs of narrative smoke that never lead to any discernible and coherent story fire, “A First Quarter” is a puzzling movie. But precious though it feels at times, it is by no means an uninteresting or irrelevant viewing experience. At the very least, the players sustain a giddy and contagious enthusiasm for their film’s ongoing creation. Moreover, its shaggy-dog discourse about the outer edges of narrative expectation has undeniable eloquence, even if its difficult to describe what it all boils down to.

“Passage to the North” (1981) upends Henrik Ibsen, rather than François Truffaut, in an effort to essay the middle ground between the viewer and the viewed. Though bookended by file footage of European firemen putting out a burning boat hull, the bulk of “Passage to the North” is made up of a series of loaded discussions and extemporaneous social power struggles staged among a group of young women, a young man, and Mr. Weiner himself. Nary a minute goes by without someone declaring or questioning a need to leave and go to “the north” with emphatic and somehow inevitable intensity. The artist sets the tone for the film’s sexually charged but chaste wine drinking, arguing, and shoving matches by sucking on one actress’s big toe while speaking on the phone, and in so doing achieves an antic home-movie looseness that evokes the infantile brilliance of George and Michael Kuchar.

Loony, affectionate, and confidently imprecise, “Passage to the North,” like the other Weiner works on display at Anthology, reveals that one of the central concepts in the artist’s conceptual art of motion pictures is to maintain a sense of humor.

Through January 29 (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).