I'm consistently disappointed by documentaries on composers. Typically, filmmakers fail at the central task of conveying the composer's origins, creative process, and context in the wider world of music. Some try too hard, as in the recently reissued 1965 CBC documentary Stravinsky, in which a sonorous narrator continually reminds us that Igor Stravinsky is a Great Man, lionizing his every step but without enough music (or least talking heads) to tell us why.

Bolder films like Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) by François Girard translate the subject directly into cinematic metaphors (squiggling pills, an underdressed, sleeve-flaunting stand-in posing in the Arctic tundra). Regrettably, Girard neglects Gould's more significant contributions as a writer on music (his 1966 essay "The Prospects of Recording" remains pertinent even to pop music) and composer (the unjustly obscure "contrapuntal radio" of The Solitude Trilogy).

Director Dorian Supin's portrait of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, 24 Preludes for a Fugue, finds a middle ground by piecing together an affectionate, though ultimately enigmatic, portrait from 24 vignettes. We do hear Pärt's unmistakable music, described as "tintinnabulation" which usually blends a simple, forlorn melody with static textures, spurts of silence, and recessed flickers of haunting, exhausted dissonance.

We see Pärt at work, miming bow-strokes while working on a score and supervising a rehearsal. He appears to live an ordinary life, putting sugar on a tomato and enjoying walks in the woods. Some of the segments were quite telling, especially "Janitor" (which I won't spoil). Yet the film's missing elements, some of which appear only in the closing "fugue"-his wife's name, his children's existence, pop culture, other composers-tell us more, affirming Pärt as mystic in our world but not of it.

Catch 24 Preludes for a Fugue Fri June 10 (Broadway Performance Hall, 1625 Broadway, 325-3113), 2 pm, $5.