The Harvard Film Archive’s retrospective of Armenian director Don Askarian includes three dense, poetic films. A meditation on the composer monk Komitas and the survival of Armenian culture, Komitas (1988) is a mineralogical work of great rhythmic and thematic intelligence, ravishing in its cyclical orchestrations of space and its undulating long-take expositions of decay and genesis. In Avetik (1992), the camera, obeying a dialectic of weight and drift, makes pilgrimages into holes, tunnels, and suddenly revealed underworlds. The film cuts back and forth between an Armenian filmmaker’s Berlin loft and Armenia itself, the latter visualized as both a memory place and a place where disaster has struck. Drawn toward random patterns created by gravity and water flow, the camera frequently lights upon some startling image: clock faces curling in flame, a piano keyboard floating on inky water, a discarded cello bursting open to reveal a honeycomb swarming with bees, a face in a religious fresco toppling to the ground and releasing a cloud of blue dust. The Berlin loft scenes are dominated by Vermeer-esque lighting, images projected on a wall, and sweeping camera movements as trains whoosh past the windows.

On the Old Roman Road (2001) is built on a similar interplay between Armenian village life and images of a modern Western city — which this time are tied to a tale of political killings in Rotterdam. Askarian builds cloying images that suggest a horrible fairy tale (a man’s head unburying itself from a mound of gray rubble, a pig unhampered in its roaming by a small hatchet sticking out of its back), and the cutting smartly keeps shots from closing one another off as narrative. But Askarian’s consciously perfunctory treatment of the thriller plot is callous, and he derails the film with a hardcore scene in which an anonymous woman is brought on screen for all of one minute to administer a blow job to a minor character.