The director Manoel de Oliveira turned 100 last year.

By A.O. SCOTT


The Late Film, a series at the BAMcinematek in Brooklyn from late April through much of May, explores movies with contradictory energies: the work of accomplished artists past their prime and full of promise. And there is something wonderfully perverse, if most likely accidental, about devoting May, symbolic of freshness and youth, to old masters in the winter of their creative lives.

The series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is unusual, even radical in the way it brings together disparate materials. Most film series are organized around a single genre or period, a national cinema or, most conventionally, a single director’s oeuvre. BAMcinematek and the program’s co-curator, Miriam Bale, have wrenched two dozen films out of those familiar contexts, bringing together a startlingly diverse array of films and filmmakers, from Yasujiro Ozu to Jean-Luc Godard, from Ernst Lubitsch to Robert Altman, from John Ford and Howard Hawks to Stanley Kubrick and Ousmane Sembene.

And rather than dwelling on established touchstones or acknowledged masterpieces, the series assembles an intriguing collage of movies that are, in their different ways, provocative and surprising, capable of challenging our assumptions about their individual makers and even about motion pictures in general.

Cinema, after all, is still a comparatively young art form, one that thrives on novelty, youth and timeliness. But the old-timers keep going, none more doggedly than Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese director (“Abraham’s Valley”) who celebrated his 100th birthday last year and who is represented in the series by“A Talking Picture,”from 2003. This picture has a lot to say. Most of it consists of deceptively casual dialogue conducted in a half-dozen languages. A history professor and her daughter are traveling by boat from their home in Lisbon to India, stopping at Mediterranean ports and chatting with people they meet about the history that surrounds them.

The immediacy of the movie seems at odds with its deliberate pacing and classical style, so that it strikes you as both uncannily old fashioned and weirdly urgent. And this feeling of anachronism, of encountering something at once old and new and therefore hard to place, may be the defining feature of the late film.

Many filmmakers, writers and artists are blessed with longevity, but not all of them arrive at true lateness, that stage where calm mastery collides with a restless sense of unfinished business, where the contemplation of mortality inspires both resignation and revolt.

Late work is both familiar and strange, characteristic of the artist and yet markedly at odds with everything that preceded it. A catalog of canonical late works might include Monet’s water lilies, Matisse’s paper cutouts and collages, Ibsen’s final plays, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and last six string quartets. Beethoven in particular looms large in Edward W. Said’s“On Late Style,”one of the few sustained critical studies of the phenomenon of lateness. For Said, a prolific critic and polemicist writing not long before his own death in 2003, the music of Beethoven’s last period displays not a collected, mature acceptance of fate but rather a“nonharmonious, nonserene tension.”

The term that attaches itself most frequently to such work, in Said’s account, is untimeliness. We have a habit of sorting culture into periods, and of plotting the careers of individual artists along an arc of development.

But poets and composers are not trees, and sometimes where we expect dead wood, we find strange new growth.

Much of the pleasure of the Late Film series resides in the coincidences it uncovers in its pursuit of the untimely. But the series also seems curiously timely, or even prescient, since we find ourselves, right now, on the verge of a heroic age of late film.

Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood, both well into their 70s, show no signs of slowing down.

In France, meanwhile, the lions of the New Wave - from Godard to Agnes Varda, from Jacques Rivette to Eric Rohmer, all represented at BAMcinematek - seem to gain vigor and ferocity with each passing decade. And the erstwhile movie brats of the New Hollywood - upstarts like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola - are at the age when people in other professions start contemplating retirement. What kind of filmmakers will they turn out to be? It may be too early to say.