By Max Goldberg

THERE HAVE ALWAYS been those filmmakers who have such clear, omnipresent artistic sensibilities that one can't help but think of them in terms of very specific personality types. Orson Welles, for one, will always seem like a magician, pulling an endless series of rabbits from his showman's hat in films like Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai. Along the same lines, I can't help but see French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert as a quietly inquisitive child, radiating with curiosity, imagination, and a solemn respect for mysteries large and small.

This sensibility comes across clearest in the director's museum films, Louvre City and Animals. In both cases, Philibert and his crew managed to gain access to a museum being made over for public exhibition; employees scurry about planning new rooms, restoring worn objects, schlepping gargantuan canvases, etc. Beyond the concentrated fascination both films convey for craftsmanship and the way things work, there is the sense that Philibert gets lost in the dreamlike fantasy of being in a museum after hours: a child's reverie, to be sure. There are endless compositions – the delight of seeing a giant elephant or stately statue made mobile, being wheeled about, or the utter strangeness that is a taxidermist molding a rhino's skin or searching through a drawer full of glass eyes – Fellini would have envied, not so much for the bizarre subjects themselves as for the focus and indelibility with which they're photographed.

Critic Kent Jones once referred to Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's films as "art with a roof on its head," and I see Philibert's work in much the same way. These are movies that refuse to take anything for granted, tirelessly engaged in a process of discovery and reexamination. Philibert handles his footage much in the way a child might a new toy, studying it from all angles, looking at it hard enough as to comprehend its essential being. Philibert's films aren't about action in the way so many other movies are; rather, they unassumingly present slices of reality, catching the rhythm, life, and breath of a world unto itself. His underseen body of work screens this week at the Pacific Film Archive and is essential viewing for those interested in cinema's realist potential.

In this sort of profile piece, it's probably important to note that Philibert makes documentaries, but his is the type of aesthetic that renders such genre labels useless. Philibert's formal convictions – he shies away from artificial light, actor-type subjects (with which most documentaries are packed), and scripts (ditto) – are put more at the service of realism than they are the documentary's pointed conventions. Indeed, it's been noted before that Philibert seems more a descendent of Renoir and the Italian neorealists than of Robert Flaherty, the Maysles brothers, and other stalwarts of the documentary tradition. The vast majority of Western documentaries, like their fictive counterparts, contain narratives that are going someplace, hell-bent on resolution. Even in films purposefully built to avoid a clear ending, like 2003's Rashomon-esque Capturing the Friedmans, there remains an undeniable forward motion.

Philibert's films, like The Bicycle Thief or Il posto, don't feel as though they're marching toward a destination so much as swaying back and forth, circling around characters, themes, and emotions; his is a distinctly poetic form of cinema that can be almost Zen-like in its crisp calm. The desire for resolution is nil in a film like To Be and to Have, in which we take things one scene at a time, just as the grade school children Philibert documents take things one day at a time: today a math lesson, tomorrow a cooking class; today a triumph, tomorrow a defeat.

In lesser hands, this material would melt into a cloying mush of trivializing sentimentality. With Philibert, though, we get a near seamless cinematic translation of life as it is. In an age when the moving image is so often co-opted for exploitative purposes, it's indescribably refreshing to see work this deeply respectful of its subjects. Rather than reducing characters to simplistic psychologies or lifestyles, Philibert treats them all as complete, multidimensional people, something filmmakers working either in fiction or documentary struggle to do and an integral component of true realism.

Philibert's films may not be polemical or political in the way so many documentaries necessarily are at this moment, but they are deeply moral in their attentiveness. His explanation for this sensibility is misleadingly simple: with regard to filming the children of To Be and to Have, he writes in the film's notes, "We were among them, with them, in a kind of silent complicity, a sort of 'benevolent neutrality,' alert to the tiniest of goings-on, to all those little next-to-nothings which make up the life of a school class." How one actually manages this is a tricky business indeed – film critic André Bazin saw it as cinema's purpose. While so much filmmaking is the stuff of dreams, Philibert is the rare director whose form is firmly entrenched in life itself. His vision doesn't demand our attention so much as it rewards it.

'Every Little Thing: The Films of Nicolas Philibert,' with the director in person at most screenings, runs Thurs/24-Sun/27, PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $4-$8. (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. See Rep Clock for a schedule.