A Look Inside the Films of Michael Glawogger THE sheer beauty in Michael Glawogger's trilogy of documentaries showing people at work across the globe can be startling. Whether it's a scene involving an Indian dye worker coated head to toe in ochre, a voluptuous Mexican stripper turned into a touchable goddess by mesmerized men, or a roiling open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria, Mr. Glawogger's spectacles can induce in viewers awe at the visuals, surprise at the intimate access to exotic lives, and perhaps a vague sense of guilt. You might wonder: Is this for real, and is it O.K. to like it? Mr. Glawogger, as a matter of practice, does not offer an answer, preferring not to soften the impact of his imagery or the force of his portraits with moral commentary. He is also unafraid to stage the occasional scene, or to compensate his subjects for their time, or to attach a P. J. Harvey soundtrack to their activities. The midcareer retrospective opening Thursday at the Museum of the Moving Image, which includes these documentaries, offers a panorama of human activity that is rare in its diversity. Mr. Glawogger's kinetic 1998 breakthrough, "Megacities," subtitled "12 Stories of Survival," strings together immersive portraits of street peddlers and other urban dwellers in their bustling environments. The film hops freely among the mostly poor inhabitants of Mumbai, New York, Mexico City and Moscow but stays just long enough to show what and how they do what they do, without the aid of a voice-over to tie everything together. Forgoing direct interviews, "Workingman's Death" from 2005 is a heady travelogue of elemental manual labor in Ukraine (coal fields), Indonesia (sulfur pits), Nigeria (that abattoir), Pakistan (gargantuan ship salvage) and China (steelworks). "I don't make anything beautiful," Mr. Glawogger, a friendly 52-year-old with a shaggy gray mane, said by Skype from his home in his native Austria. It's like Plato says: Beauty is the splendor of truth. So if there is any truth in that reality, I show it comes from there. The key perhaps is Mr. Glawogger's depiction of what are, for most, unfamiliar milieus. "I need places that show, that disclose themselves, where I can show something without language," he said. His latest, "Whores" Glory," which begins a theatrical run on April 27, certainly qualifies. This triptych of prostitution - observing the hustle and conversation in a Bangkok whorehouse called the Fish Tank, a Bangladeshi brothel ghetto and a roadside strip in Mexico - opens with pole-grinding Thai prostitutes in a second-level show window zapping pedestrians below with green laser pointers. It's an idea - the shifting and often surprising power dynamics between professionals and customers - that will recur from one society to the next. " "Whores" Glory" is an odd experience," said David Schwartz, chief curator of the Museum of the Moving Image, where the retrospective was organzied by Dennis Lim, who contributes articles to The New York Times. It's classically photographed and so beautiful in its sense of landscape, but that's an interesting contrast with what you're watching on screen. The film took four years to make, but much of that involved getting to know his subjects and securing permission from authorities. Even during shooting Thai censors wanted to be present. The women and their clients speak frankly, and in the Mexico section Mr. Glawogger includes an actual sexual encounter. Capturing these demimondes is no small task. Mr. Glawogger may use modest crews, but the productions have good-size budgets - at least for documentaries - thanks to expenses like film stock. "Workingman's Death" cost an estimated $2 million. Crucial to the team is the Austrian cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler, who has known Mr. Glawogger since they were students at the Filmakademie in Vienna in the 1980s. "We are always looking for strong images to tell a story," Mr. Thaler said by e-mail. If there is no image in our cinematographic sense, we don't shoot. Like Mr. Glawogger he's ardent about using film instead of digital cameras. "Workingman's Death," for example, was shot on Super 16 millimeter using Kodak film, with a special filter for a warm tone, followed by the overexposure of the negative in postproduction. Mr. Glawogger's appreciation of visceral imagery and rich color can be traced to his education in experimental film, before schooling in Vienna, at the San Francisco Art Institute. There he made experimental shorts and admired Stan Brakhage and Peter Kubelka, whose works amount to a master course in sensual color and disparate editing. "Megacities" features a kind of tribute to this avant-garde background, in the form of a Mumbai resident who screens spliced bits of Bollywood reels for children. "He doesn't even know he's Bruce Conner," Mr. Glawogger said, referring to the San Francisco-based found-footage pioneer. When he was getting his start, Mr. Glawogger worked as assistant to another Austrian director, Ulrich Seidl, whose strange, deadpan films drift between fiction and documentary. Mr. Glawogger has also made fiction features, which, like his documentaries, accept the chaos and contradictions of human existence. In "Kill Daddy Good Night," from 2009, the Jewish designer of a patricidal video game turns his back on his politician father but winds up looking after a war criminal hiding in America. The 2006 black comedy "Slumming" looks at what happens after a rich brat dumps a drunken vagrant across the border in the Czech Republic, exploring some of the same tensions across class boundaries that Mr. Glawogger's documentaries can arouse. Both films, along with the gonzo 2009 crime comedy "Contact High," will also screen at the Museum of the Moving Image (which focuses on Mr. Glawogger's career from "Megacities" on). They reflect a filmmaker who follows the varieties of human experience down whatever road they take him. Though Mr. Glawogger, who will appear at a screening in the series, calls himself a traveling filmmaker, he chuckled and agreed with a suggestion that he's the reverse: a filmmaking traveler. "At the moment I am in the financing of a film called "Untitled." And it's a film about nothing," he said with a smile. I'll travel once around the world in one year, and I'll bring home a film.