Through Nov. 11 the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, is presenting a 33-title retrospective of his work, including new prints of films like his 1966 sensation “The Chelsea Girls” a sampling of the 472 “Screen Tests” he shot of Susan Sontag, Lou Reed and other fabulous scene-makers; and excerpts from early minimalist epics like the eight-hour “Empire” (1964) and the 5-hour 21-minute “Sleep” (1963) . The museum will also present “A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory,” a documentary about a filmmaker who had been one of Warhol’s intimates, and “Beautiful Darling,” a work in progress about Candy Darling, a notable figure in what the museum is calling “Warhol’s World.” For film lovers there is no more important show in town.In the years since his death in 1987 from a heart attack at 58 (or thereabouts), after undergoing gall bladder surgery, Warhol has continued to make money and headlines with his fine art even as his films have remained largely from view. In May a new record for his work was set at a New York auction when a 1963 painting of a car crash was sold to an anonymous buyer for $71.7 million. Meanwhile, in the 2006 fiction film “Factory Girl,” about Edie Sedgwick, his most famous superstar, Warhol’s already creepy mainstream profile reaches its nadir with a portrait of the artist as the embodiment of 1960s urban decadence, a gay vampire sucking the life out of an innocent led astray. On the first page of his memoir “Popism: The Warhol Sixties,” written with Pat Hackett, he explains that Pop artists “did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles — all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” About 10 pages later he adds one other item to the list of things that some Abstract Expressionists tried hard not to notice: homosexuality. “You’re too swish,” his friend, the filmmaker Emile de Antonio, bluntly dropped, when Warhol asked why Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg didn’t like him. “And that upsets them.” Warhol’s success as a commercial artist, exemplified by his award-winning illustrations for the shoe company I. Miller that ran in this paper, didn’t help his reputation with serious or self-serious artists either. Though hurt by the disdain, Warhol decided he “wasn’t going to care, because those were all things that I didn’t want to change anyway, that I didn’t think I should want to change.” He added, “And as for the ‘swish’ thing, I’d always had a lot of fun with that — just watching the expressions on people’s faces. You’d have to have seen the way all the Abstract Expressionist painters carried themselves and the kinds of images they cultivated, to understand how shocked people were to see a painter coming on swish.” That swish thing is critical to Warhol’s films, where beautiful butch boys in tight jeans and leather jackets share the screen with transvestites in elegant dime-store drag. Ms. Sedgwick may have been his most famous superstar (at least the one now most likely to adorn a book jacket), and plenty of women crossed in front of his camera. But it’s all the male bodies — adorned, adored and at times stripped bare — that underscore the radical politics of Warhol’s gaze. “Our movies may have looked like home movies,” Andy Warhol wrote, responding to one of his critics, “but then our home wasn’t like anybody else’s.” From 1963 through 1968 Warhol shot hundreds of these home movies, work that is short and dauntingly long, silent and sound, scripted and improvised, often in black and white though also in color, still as death and alive to its moment. Awkward, beautiful, raw, spellbinding, radical — they are films like few others, in part because, first and foremost, they are also sublime art. Yet in Warhol’s films the illusions of Hollywood, with its seamless narratives and industrial imperatives, are self-consciously replaced by other illusions, notably those pertaining to identity. The performers in his films play a shifting catalog of roles — biker boy, hustler, debutante, faded movie queen, aged grand artiste — that are simultaneously constructed and poignantly real. This is who we are, each seems to say, whether aggressively staring into (or perhaps, more accurately, staring down) the camera or pretending to ignore it altogether. Though Warhol rarely appears on camera, the films feel profoundly autobiographical; they’re individualistic records of the world in which he played, made art and helped construct his own slippery, elusive identity. They are part ethnography, part memento mori and wholly personal. Warhol withdrew his 1960s films from circulation around 1970, two years after he was almost shot to death by Valerie Solanas, a freaked-out feminist who makes a startling appearance in a stairwell in his 1967 film “I, a Man.” (She harasses the film’s title character, a hustling Adonis whose supposed “squishy” rear end she derides.) While Warhol was in the hospital recuperating, Paul Morrissey, the name most associated with Warhol’s cinematic output, directed the feature-length narrative “Flesh.” After recovering from his wounds, at least physically, Warhol made only one other film himself, “Blue Movie” (in which a man and woman have coitus uninterruptus), in the fall of 1968. Mr. Morrissey directed other films, including “Andy Warhol’s Dracula” and “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein,” which Warhol helped produce. In 1966 Warhol began screening his films as part of multimedia extravaganzas initially called the Erupting Plastic Inevitable that he, the Velvet Underground and other Factory members mounted at the Dom, a Polish dance hall turned discotheque on St. Marks Place. (Erupting later grew into Exploding.) Warhol and others projected films like “Empire” and “Vinyl,” slipping colored gels over the images, while the Velvets bombarded eardrums, strobe lights pulsed and the demimonde danced with the uptown gawkers. To publicize the event Warhol and company took out a newspaper ad for the opening that seductively beckoned with the words “Come Blow Your Mind.” Rarely has there been so much truth in advertising.