By the end of Andrzej Munk’s short life (he died in a car accident in 1961, age 39), he had become a vanguard figure for a newly vital Polish cinema. His films — the subject of a retrospective this week at the Harvard Film Archive — view their historical past with irony and icy fury.

Man on the Track (1956; Tuesday at 7 p.m. and Wednesday at 9:15 p.m.) is the multiple-flashback investigation of the life of Orzechowski, an elderly train engineer who is struck and killed by a train in the first minutes of the film. Brusque and martinet-like, Orzechowski is, it becomes clear, an individualist, a folk hero manqué, a spokesman for the superiority of practical experience over any idealism. He straddles the pre-Communist and the Communist worlds, but he’s inadmissible in the latter and has to be destroyed. The film hides the necessity of this destruction by contriving a tragic situation for which no one is to blame. Bad things happen for no reason, or when reason blinks, but they turn out to serve the ends of reason and work for the good of the system.

Munk is on the verge, in this film, of creating a work of radical irony, a questioning of Communist absolutes. He must, of course, stop short of this verge, or pretend to be going somewhere else: here the pedestrian nature of much of the mise-en-scène operates as a decoy, as does the flagrant bid to enroll the film in the ranks of international art cinema by adopting the multiple-flashback narrative procedure of Citizen Kane and Rashomon (which in Munk’s hands feels like a dutiful cliché). But Man on the Track remains remarkable for its grimness and its ambivalence.

Neither of these qualities is sufficient to explain the revelation of Eroica (1958; on a bill with Munk’s 1955 feature-film debut, The Men of the Blue Cross, Sunday at 2 p.m. and Monday at 7 p.m.). "A heroic symphony in two parts," the film is a thoroughly unpatriotic examination of the part played by Poles in World War II. It opens with a military drill for civilians, one of whom interrupts the proceedings by pointing out to the sergeant that a plane is about to attack. Throughout, Munk blurs the line between play war and real war. Things are not fully real, or else they’re shown to be real only if they’re believed in: the protagonist in the first part wanders through a demolished world unaware of the war going on around him, and he fulfills his vital mission for the Polish Resistance in an alcoholic stupor.

The comic picaresque mode of the first part gives way to a darker mood in the second part, which is set in a German POW camp, but the critique of heroism is sustained, as the prisoners bicker among themselves ("This is our part of the table"). Finally — in a cruel inversion of the message of Jean Renoir’s POW film, La grande illusion — it’s only by means of fiction that some reality is salvaged: the heroic escapee of legend turns out to be hiding in the ceiling, and everyone agrees that it would be best to pretend that he has escaped.

Munk’s most famous film, Passenger (screens Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 7 p.m., and next Thursday at 7 p.m.), was also his last. His death during the production left Passenger unfinished; it was reconstructed in 1963 in the form of a speculation that compounds the questions he posed of his story and his characters with questions about where he would have taken them had he survived. The interrogatory form proves apt for this stark and relentless work.

The central character, Liza, recounts two versions of her past as an SS overseer at Auschwitz. In the first, sanitized version, which she gives her husband aboard a luxury liner on which she’s returning to Germany for the first time since the end of the war, she benevolently reunites two lovers among the prisoners but is powerless to intervene further in their destinies. In the second, more detailed version, which she remembers in solitude, her own motives are tangled and obscure, and her relationship with the female prisoner appears obsessive. As much as for the psychological interest of this relationship, Passenger is extraordinary for its terrifying exactness of tone and for its indelible representation of brutalities enacted in the background, or on the periphery, of the main character’s consciousness. This fragmentary film is no less painful and abrupt than Munk’s short career.