“Autoportrait Morcelé” (2009), from an exhibit of Agnès Varda’s work at Blum & Poe gallery. © AGNÈS VARDA / PHOTOGRAPH BY GENEVIEVE HANSON / BLUM & POE

Movie theatres used to be more like art galleries. Many viewers went without regard to showtimes and dropped in on a movie in progress, staying again to watch from the start to their own entry point (thus, the origin of the phrase “This is where I came in”). Now moviegoing—expensive and rare—is undertaken with a devotional rigor, and the casual side of watching movies is found mainly in private (cell phones on trains). But, for a short while this spring, such viewing is back in public at the Blum & Poe art gallery, in New York, with a whimsical yet impassioned exhibit of work by the filmmaker Agnès Varda.

Varda, of course, is one of the crucial modern directors; she made her first film, “La Pointe Courte,” in 1954, as a twenty-five-year-old independent filmmaker, and her most recently released film is “The Beaches of Agnès,” from 2008. (She has a new film forthcoming, “Visages, Visages,” which she co-directed with the photographer JR.) The gallery exhibit is the work of a filmmaker who has been, so to speak, between films—but Varda’s career has always been enlivened by an essential and constant sense of between-ness, an occasionalism in the best sense of the term. She has made many films that, rather than following the rigid dictates of a long-standing plan (or, for that matter, of a script), were made in rapid response to sudden new situations—or, when they were set up in advance, maintained a large margin of freedom for unexpected events. Varda uses fiction as a spring-loaded contraption to unleash the element of documentary within her films, and she uses documentary as a magic wand to conjure fictions.

Her show at Blum & Poe, which runs through April 15th, starts with an aspect of personal documentary—the re-creation of a 1954 exhibit of eighteen photographs that was the first public coming-out of her art. What’s distinctive about these photos is their variety, ranging from puckishly opaque portraiture to three panels showing face-like images arising from the parts of a faucet, of a truck grille, of reflections in mottled glass. Two nude men posed in the ruins of an ancient house, the widescreen image of a dog amid the stone and rubble of a desolate street, even a closeup of a person’s rear end squeezed on a chair, dispels the sense of reportage in two contradictory directions—the abstract aestheticism of texture and the symbolic psychology of fantasy, materialist hyperrealism and reverberant surrealism. But the biggest surprise among the photos is the very first—of a heart-shaped and sprouting potato. It’s an image that has recurred multiple times in Varda’s later career, as a subject of “The Gleaners and I,” an element of her 2003 exhibit “Patatutopia,” and a part of “The Beaches of Agnès.”

Those are the elements from which the major parts of the gallery exhibit are derived—kitchen domesticity, beaches, and the temporal implications of still images. The centerpiece of the show is a poised, luminous, tender, and diabolically clever video installation, “Le Triptyque de Noirmoutier” (The Noirmoutier Triptych), which Varda shot on 35-mm. film and which, though it runs a mere nine minutes and thirty seconds, has a classical cinematic amplitude. Noirmoutier is an island on the French Atlantic coast where Varda and her late husband, the director Jacques Demy, have a house. Elsewhere (as in “The Beaches of Agnès”), she integrated the place and its residents into her work. Here, she abstracts its elements into a calmly grand practical fantasy.

Installation view of “Le Triptyque de Noirmoutier” (2004-2005 ). © AGNÈS VARDA / PHOTOGRAPH BY GENEVIEVE HANSON / BLUM & POE

The left channel is the beach, with the camera looking along the shoreline, into the distance; there, far away, two boys make sand castles. The central channel is the kitchen of a modest house, with the camera facing a heavy wooden table at which an older woman in a mobcap sits at the left, a thirtyish woman sits at the right, and a thirtyish man sits in the center, at the head of the table, though all three come and go in the course of the action. The right channel shows an inner room with a cupboard filled with blue-and-white Delft-like crockery. The man gets himself a bottle of beer; the older woman heads with dishes from the sink toward the cupboard—and crosses the dividing line of the triptych exactly like crossing a threshold. The man opens the door to the left and heads to the beach (reaching it instantly) and takes over for the boys, who dash off. In the kitchen, the two women work—the older one unknots string, the younger one peels potatoes. The action runs without dialogue but full of sound—the rush of gentle waves, the clinking of silverware, the whispers of peeling, the clatter of glassware, the scrape of chairs and the thud of a door.

But when Varda varies the fixed frame and its angles—when she films directly at the sea and watches the man walk, left to right, parallel to the shore—she delivers a sublime flourish of quiet formalist comedy that reaches deep into the caverns of imagination and rises quickly back up with extreme closeups of the peeling at the table. (Varda pays special attention to the domestic arts; the elder woman’s translucent apple slices are like works of art in themselves.)“The Noirmoutier Triptych” has an interactive element—two hinged end-panels of the screen that visitors are invited to close and open. Doing so doesn’t change the image that’s projected there; rather, it turns the screen into a sort of cupboard and rouses the contemplative viewer into a bit of playful effort (more like sand castles than potato-peeling). Gender, age, and family; labor and sustenance, beauty and surplus; constraint and leisure, interaction and imagination, relationships and self-images, intimate bonds and inner and outer solitudes—all are deftly and tenderly implied and implicated in Varda’s intimate mini-cinema.

Two other video installations have a slighter but still considerable substance. In “Bord de Mer” (Seaside), a photo-mural of the sea and the sky (in effect, a portrait of the face of the ocean) is matched, on the floor, by a video (and sound) loop of gentle waves washing onto shore, and, in front of that floor screen, Varda places a rectangle of sand. In a diptych, Varda juxtaposes her 1956 photo of visitors to a Corbusier terrace with her 2008 video “Les Gens de la Terrasse” (The People on the Terrace), a two-and-a-half-minute blend of fiction and autofiction in which Varda fantasizes about what the people (five adults and a baby) were doing just before she took the picture, and in which she depicts the theatrical setup, with décor and film equipment and crew, with which she stages the imaginary photo-prequel.

The exhibit also includes small-scale models (made with Super-8 film strips) of two of the full-sized, habitable film huts—made with discarded prints of her own films—that she created for museum shows and displayed in “The Beaches of Agnès.” Wasting not, making creative use of whatever’s at hand, is a symbolic act that reverberates throughout the Blum & Poe show, as throughout Varda’s entire career (and it’s the very subject of “The Gleaners and I”). Varda is a worker of art: for her, art is the making as much as it’s the thing that’s made. Working is gathering, pulling the elements together—from the ground, from the surroundings, from the neighborhood, even from the lists of actors and technicians. The creation is in the approach, the gesture; the artist is Queen Midas, whose touch turns potatoes into gold. That’s why, for Varda, there’s no boundary between art and life, between documentary and fiction, between the domestic and the public, between the real and the imagined. That’s why, though Varda is no trained actor, she’s one of the most striking presences in her own films and in the modern cinema. Whether she’s making a feature film, a short video, a photo, or a hut, the core of her art is simply a matter of her being there; through even her casual gestures, the world falls into order and form, style and substance around her, as do the images in which she reveals it. That’s the highest definition of art itself.