“Cinema, basically, is an illustration of the 19th-century novel,” says British director Peter Greenaway, sweeping 100 years of film history off the table and into the dustbin. “The narrative schemes at the end of the 20th Century in cinema haven’t developed much more than D.W. Griffith’s.” This is the kind of grand, aggravating statement that Mr. Greenaway is known for, and the worst thing about it is that he’s right. Now more than ever, movies are little more than illustrated books, comic books, or 35 mm adaptations of video games and television shows. Simplistic and plodding, overlong and overly literal, they’re as primitive as cave drawings.

That’s why watching the re-release of Mr. Greenaway’s first two movies, “The Draughtman’s Contract” and “A Zed and Two Noughts,” both of which which begin week-long runs today at the IFC Center, is as welcoming as walking into an air-conditioned building during a summertime heat wave. His movies are less stories and more collections of ideas, thoughts, and philosophies, all crammed full of lists and collected esoterica with metaphors piled on top of symbols, tottering under the weight of some obscure mathematical structuring device. Take them straight and you’re liable to wind up drunk on inspiration.

“A Zed and Two Noughts” (1985) is a particularly formidable brand of intellectual moonshine. It starts with a swan smashing through the windshield of a Mercury that’s driving past a zoo on a road called Swan’s Way, causing an accident that kills the two women in the back seat and leaves the driver with one leg. The two dead women are the spouses of separated Siamese twin naturalists who work at the zoo and they desperately attempt to wring meaning out of this tragedy. One brother begins a mad campaign to free all the zoo animals in evolutionary order, poring over nature films for clues to the meaning of life. The other brother becomes obsessed with decay, shooting time-lapse films of animals as they rot. Mr. Greenaway was a visual artist who didn’t start making feature films until he was in his early 40s, so he brings an adult sensibility to his movies that is missing from so many current films. But what saves “Zed” from sinking under its own pretensions is the fact that it looks and sounds ravishing. Photographed by Sacha Vierny, Alain Resnais’s longtime cinematographer, every frame is as carefully composed as an old master painting, strictly organized around vertical divisions (to symbolize the separated twins) and containing eight elegant tracking shots, one for each of the eight stages of man. Precisely lit, the images are underscored with Michael Nyman’s minimalist music (as heard in “The Piano”), all throbbing strings, pulsating brass, and aching woodwinds.

Spirituality and science both fail the two brothers as they desperately try to answer the Big Question of “Why?” But the film is teeming with casual nudity, maggot-infested corpses, animals running wild, birth, amputation, pets, bestiality, pornography, and sex, suggesting that life is too unstoppable, too wild, too varied to be explained by God or the test tube.

Before he moved into features, Mr. Greenaway made about 30 short films, many of them complicated, actorless, fake documentaries with titles like “Windows” and “26 Bathrooms.” His first feature, however, was an explosion of verbal fireworks. A Restoration revenge drama, “The Draughtman’s Contract” (1982) tells the story of Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins), who is hired by a rich woman to draw 12 views of her husband’s estate. The snobbish draughtsman controls the 12 views with an iron hand, chasing out the sheep and humans who intrude on his sketching. During the course of his 12-day project, seemingly random items begin to appear in his frame: a ladder, a torn jacket, a pair of boots. It slowly becomes clear that these could be evidence of a murder and that the draughtsman has been brought to the house to either provide an alibi or an heir, to be a patsy or a witness, and he doesn’t realize which it is until the moment before he’s surrounded and brought down like a hunted fox. It’s a poison-pen essay on the difference between seeing and understanding.

Mr. Greenaway doesn’t want us to have an emotional reaction to his movies; he wants an intellectual reaction. “You don’t go into the National Gallery and cry, sob, laugh, fall about on the floor,” he says. Maybe this makes him a bit cold, but in a summer of overheated sequels and overhyped comic book superheroes, your brain needs something to help cool off.

Through July 12 (323 Sixth Ave. at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).