Outsider art The Independent Film Festival of Boston plays on BY PETER KEOUGH

Film and music share many elements — rhythm, dissonance, harmony, a dynamic structure unfolding in time. They also share a system of production and distribution that tends to stifle and corrupt originality and creativity. Following up on the promise of its acclaimed debut last year, the Independent Film Festival of Boston offers a number of outstanding efforts that explore the conflict between artistic integrity and commercial compromise, between social conformity and creative vision.

That’s the conflict that bugs the subjects of Ondi Timoner’s DiG! (April 30 at 10 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre and May 1 at 2 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre, with the director, producer Vasco Nunes, and Brian Jonestown Massacre band member Joel Gion in attendance). Anton Newcombe, founder of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, wants no part of a corporate sellout, so he produces 11 albums independently. He also does a lot of drugs, engages the other band members in drunken, on-stage fist fights, and in general is an obnoxious megalomaniac whose premature contraction of Kurt Cobainitis guarantees that his huge talent, even genius (a retro fusion perhaps best described by the album title Her Satanic Majesty’s Second Request), will remain obscure, perhaps rediscovered long after he’s dead. "Shouldn’t you become a success first before you destroy yourself with drugs?" someone sensibly asks.

Newcombe’s counterpart — and friend and rival — is Courtney Taylor-Taylor, head of the Dandy Warhols (if the Monkees modeled themselves after the Velvet Underground instead of the Beatles, they would be the Warhols). Salieri and Mozart? Perhaps. Narrating the film with an arch insouciance, Taylor-Taylor idolizes Newcombe’s brilliance but holds his road of excess in contempt. While the Massacre are getting busted by cops on the way to a gig in Homer, Georgia, French gendarmes politely return the dope they take from the Dandys during a triumphant European tour.

Timoner began to document the two bands seven years ago in the expectation that there would be a story. And so there is, one that poses the question "Who is more successful, the defiant Massacre or the compromised Warhols?" Unfortunately, she doesn’t give us one complete song from either band (the Massacre’s performances invariably end in fistfights), so time will have to be the judge.

At least Newcombe got to choose his marginalization. "There are no freaks, misfits, and accidents. There are only things human beings do not understand." That’s the quote from writer Marlo Morgan that kicks off Big City Dick: Richard Petersen’s First Movie, by Scott Milam, Todd Pottinger, and Ken Harder (April 30 at 2:30 p.m. and May 1 at 6 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre and May 2 at 2:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with Milam and Pottinger in attendance). What follows is indeed hard to understand: an incoherent video of a maniac in a parking lot shrieking about Johnny Mathis. The maniac is Richard Petersen, and chances are that if you met him on the street in Seattle playing "Jingle Bells," you might give him some change but wouldn’t want to borrow his sweater. The many random talents of this "real-life Rain Man" include an encyclopædic memory of all the musical cues and themesongs of the TV shows of the ’50s (Sea Hunt is a favorite). Not only can Petersen draw precise pictures of local architecture and tell you the day of the week for any date in history, he’s a musical prodigy who fuses his TV lore and his obsession with Mathis into some of the weirdest music ever made. He craves success and celebrity and acceptance like everyone else, and despite his outlandish appearance, he becomes an understandable and sympathetic character once you get to know him. The filmmakers are deft in re-creating that process of comprehension, disclosing with disarming casualness the dark truths and poignant details of their subject’s origins and fate.

Another outsider making art is animator Bruce Bickford in Brett Ingram’s Monster Road (April 30 at 12:30 p.m. and May 1 at 9 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre). At first glance, he’d seem to fit into the freak or misfit category, and at second glance too. A loner living with his Alzheimer’s-stricken father outside Seattle, he devises intricate, Boschian worlds of claymation, hundreds of figures exfoliating and collapsing together and engaging in orgies of killing and creation. Like Petersen, Bickford chafes at the futility of his career, even as he fashions works of such breathtaking strangeness that he can’t get anyone to look at them. Also like Petersen, Bickford has memories that trouble him, and an imagination that would turn perhaps to sadism and depravity if not for the release and the sublimation of his art.

One can imagine the young hero of Keith Behrman’s minimalist and moody Flower & Garnet (April 30 and May 2 at 3:30 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre, with the director in attendance) growing up to be a hermetic genius like Bickford. The film opens with the newborn Garnet in an incubator, then cuts to mom being laid to rest — she died giving birth. Dad wants to dump Garnet off with relatives, but daughter Flower, all of about eight, takes him back home. Some years later, dad, still resentful and drinking, ignores Garnet, and Flower, now a teenager, has tired of being a surrogate mother to the two and opts for a life of her own. Trouble arises when dad, in an attempt to restore his connection with the boy, gets him a BB gun for his birthday. He should have gone with a guitar or a camera.

For music, at least in the movies, can sometimes soothe the savaged breast. In The Story of the Weeping Camel, from Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni (May 2 at 9 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre), a Mongol family’s idyllic life in the Gobi Desert unravels a little when, after a difficult birth, one of their camels rejects its colt. Why is it that animals in distress are so much more affecting than humans on the screen? You’ll weep too as the poor little colt (a white one about the size of a Great Dane with a Muppet face) sheds tears, chasing his mother in vain through a sandstorm, desperate to nurse. When all else fails, the family bring in a traditional musician, and in a ritual that seems genuine, something amazing happens.

I say "seems genuine" because until the end credits, I was sure that Weeping Camel was true, a documentary, so vérité is the filmmakers’ cinema. In fact, it’s a story played out by, it appears, actors, though it’s rendered with the redolent authenticity of real yurts (surprisingly luxurious inside) in an unforgiving wilderness. Oh well, they say Robert Flaherty made up stuff too.

There’s no confusing Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World (May 2 at 5 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre) with a documentary. It’s exuberantly, triumphantly artificial, with sets and a sensibility like Doktor Caligari with a sense of humor or Fritz Lang collaborating with Buster Keaton or even Monty Python. It too is a tale of the redeeming power of art, of the struggle of the isolated genius who must share his vision with the world, and (of course) of the unending torments of screwed-up families. You could think of it as the happy version of Lars von Trier’s Dogville. In Depression-era Winnipeg, beer tycoon Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) institutes a contest that will give $25,000 to anyone who can produce the saddest music in the world (it will move more people to buy her product, she speculates). Contestants come from every nation to compete. They include Port-Huntley’s old flame Chester, now a repatriated American. It seems Chester was having an affair with her while she was betrothed to Chester’s father; the ménage ended badly with Port-Huntley losing both legs in a freak accident worthy of Peter Greenaway.

There are, then, many issues to be resolved, and the contest proves a kind of musical Olympics crossed with Family Feud as Chester comes representing America, dad performs for Canada, and long-lost brother Roderick shows up to saw at a cello for Serbia. Perhaps the best line of the film, one that sums it all up, comes from Maria de Medeiros as Chester’s mistress Narcissa: "I’m not an American; I’m a nymphomaniac." The Saddest Music in the World sublimates sadness into a thirst for beer.

Ryuhei Kitamura’s Azumi (April 30 at midnight at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, May 1 at 11:30 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre, and May 2 at 9:30 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre) sublimates violence and vengeance into the guilt-free pleasure of sheer cinema. Shot with a fluid, gravity-defying kineticism that is so slick it looks like anime, this tale of an orphan girl trained as an assassin is like Kill Bill without any of the referential baggage, Kurosawa without the bother of character or theme.

Actually, there is a theme, of sorts. Should teenagers trained as a lethal team of killers during the civil wars of the 16th-century Tokugawa shogunate obey their master’s orders even when those contradict the ideals they were trained to uphold? Sure, especially if it makes for ecstatically blood-drenched ballets like this one. Kitamura handles the byzantine plot as effortlessly as the thrilling action sequences. In the early going, one of Azumi’s comrades cries out "Why?" after being ordered to kill his best friend. The best reason comes from the film’s bad guy: "This is going to be fun!"

The Independent Film Festival of Boston

At the Brattle Theatre, the Somerville Theatre, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre April through May 2.

For a complete Independent Film Festival of Boston schedule, visit www.ifsboston.org.