It’s a fleeting moment that the documentary holds up as a glowing ember of insight. The din of that mechanical bell: doesn’t it call to mind the urgent commotion in so much of Mr. Coleman’s music? Of course it does, especially in light of an abrupt cut to Prime Time, his crypto-funk band, in feverish midgroove. You’re invited to draw this connection yourself, fancying a peek into the artist’s psyche, though Mr. Coleman remains as much an enigma, and his music as radiantly confounding, as before.

“Ornette: Made in America,” which was released theatrically in 1985 and opens again, in a print restored by Milestone Films, at the IFC Center in Manhattan on Friday, is full of such tantalizing stuff: formal juxtapositions, half-sketched implications, parallel experiments of image and sound. By virtue of the footage alone, it’s a valuable time capsule for anyone drawn to Mr. Coleman’s work, particularly in the two decades following the cusp of the 1960s, when his dauntless, affirming vision of free improvisation famously created a crisis of faith in jazz.

What nudges the film beyond archival value is a cadence and visual style proudly in tune with the music. The impetus behind “Ornette: Made in America” was the 1983 opening of Caravan of Dreams, an arts center in Fort Worth. Kathelin Hoffman, the center’s director at the time, had invited Mr. Coleman to take part in the festivities, and he responded with a trilogy: his large-canvas work “Skies of America,” performed by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra with bracing interjections by Prime Time; a superheated Prime Time nightclub set; and a calmly prickly string quartet, “Prime Design/Time Design,” played in a geodesic dome.