By Dennis Harvey

AS OF THE late '60s, droves of disaffected youth took to the road, bearing backpacks and no particular plan except the abstract questing one. So, too, did a new breed of filmmaker, those permanent expats whose filmographies – if they stayed in the game long enough to accumulate one – would always bear the character of that era's advanced cultural tourism. Barbet Schroeder is perhaps the quintessential man-without-a-country-with-a-camera. Born in Tehran to a German geologist and raised in Iran and Argentina, Schroeder studied philosophy and dabbled in criticism, jazz promotion, and photography before finding a medium to settle on. His peculiarly affectless cinema has found equal interest in everything from Idi Amin and the San Francisco Zoo's "talking" gorilla Koko (among other documentary subjects) to the Claus von Bülow case (Reversal of Fortune), yuppie psychosis (Single White Female), L.A. lush life (Barfly), and compulsive gambling (Tricheurs).

There's no evident through-line here, save the ability to view extreme situations with dispassionate, not-quite-dislocated calm. If Schroeder has the intelligence to get almost any milieu just about right, his craft nonetheless resists emotional involvement, which can be either a virtue or a source of puzzlement. Now past 60, he's still an authorial blank, a Flying Dutchman traveling the world in search of whatever is most unfamiliar – most recently in last year's excellent Our Lady of the Assassins, a digital drama set in cataclysmic Colombia that views constant death with just the same resigned neutrality he exerted on-screen a half life earlier. Notably, his one clear failure – 1995's noir remake Kiss of Death – misfired because it was a conventional revenge story requiring only the committed hyperbole he'd never been able to summon or even mimic.

Schroeder has acted both in Jacques Rivette films and Beverly Hills Cop III; he produced a slew of career-making films for Eric Rohmer, an artist whose finite style and concerns couldn't be more at odds with his own. Who, exactly, is he? If the tourist is defined by a home soon returned to, a traveler is defined by chance, absorption, eternal departure – a meandering map line that obliterates self, or perhaps replaces it. Belatedly cued by Assassins' creative "comeback," the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts series "A Radiant Abyss: Early Films by Barbet Schroeder" rewinds to Schroeder's first features as director, finding no particular answers but a lot of characteristic inquiry. The three films included were once art-house and campus staples, now long gone from routine circulation. They've dated far less than most from their day – a testament to Schroeder's neutral eye and the unpinnable mind behind it.

More (1969) is specifically about pan-European rootlessness, the '60s countercultural drift that, while temporary in some cases, would leave its permanent mark: syringes scattered about old-world alleyways by less willful others. German college grad Stefan (Klaus Grünberg) hitches to Paris, meets willowy American Estelle (the great Mimsy Farmer), and follows her to Ibiza and a gradual heroin-addicted ruin. Her golden amorality doesn't seek to destroy but manages nonetheless. A cautionary tale only in outline, More captures the shapelessness of time and the impotent futility of resistance when desire – slowly, imperceptibly, then helplessly – subsumes the self.

The next year Schroeder traipsed off with crew to Papua New Guinea for La vallée (The valley), another counterculture trek to destinations unknown. Bulle Ogier plays an uptight French ambassador's wife whiling away privileged time buying native artifacts for boutique resale; she falls in with a group of hippies questing after a remote, possibly mythical valley that may be Paradise itself. Gradually her inhibitions are loosened by psychedelics, sexual experimentation, and the primordial jungle. Reuniting Schroeder with brilliant cinematographer Néstor Almendros and with the soundtrack musings of a just post-Syd Pink Floyd, La vallée is ravishing yet ambiguous – a long, shaggy prelude to the Shangri-la of Lost Horizon (1973) that's uncertain whether the goal exists or our protagonists are worthy of it.

After pausing for his Amin project, Schroeder returned to fiction with the notorious 1976 Maîtresse, a study of S-M as coolly detached as the prior year's hit Story of O was swooningly partisan. Gérard Depardieu is a young petty thief transfixed by the contradictions of his new lover (Ogier again). He can't balance their love affair's conventional jealousies and bliss against the businesslike role-playing extremis of her trade as professional dominatrix with a fully equipped torture room secreted below a coffee-table trapdoor.

The exotica here is both lurid and sterile. Purported use of real-life masochists as on-screen "clients" allowed spanked cheeks to truly flush deep-red; in one scene a penis is nailed to a board. Still it's just commerce. Depardieu's mistake is assuming that these acts somehow infringe on his emotional life. As ever with Schroeder, the film risks no such confusion. We may cringe, but it never blinks. The spectacle is only interesting, another insider's tour to be absorbed before moving on, once again.