Now that's what I call video

No matter how grim things look for movies or records sales, music videos have it pretty rough. In the nosebleed sections of many cable systems and satellite services (the two and three hundreds) there are a handful of channels devoted to rotating videos on a digital spit.

These channels are a godsend if you've been dying to see Lindsay Lohan, Kenny Chesney, Usher, or the J. Geils Band's ''Centerfold." But to stay current with the state of the art, you would have to move to another country (I'd suggest Japan) or surf a lot of Web. As far as broadcast television is concerned, the work of creative masterminds and ingenious upstarts working with less-than-best-selling artists remains virtually homeless. There is an upside: Film festivals and art museums have recently begun taking them in.

This is as it should be. At its best, the video is a work of art. The programmers at the Edinburgh International Film Festival have figured this out. In the mid-1990s, when the event was already in its 50s, the festival's Mirrorball division started showcasing music videos. Not the Spice Girls', but chancy, innovative stuff. For its 10th anniversary, Mirrorball's programmers put together a ''best of" collection, which is showing at the Museum of Fine Arts starting Thursday, along with two of the festival's 2005 programs, ''Fresh Tracks" and ''Global Selection."

On the festival's website, the folks behind the best-of collection said that whittling down what was likely several hundred videos to an essential 20 proved contentious. And you might object to what's not there. Nothing starring Missy Elliott or directed by Chris Cunningham or Hype Williams made the cut, for example. But what did is uniformly excellent. Spike Jonze's video for Wax's garage-pop lament ''California," an early piece from 1996, is one long take of a man on fire running in slow motion down a Los Angles sidewalk. The burning man, we discover, is running for the bus, and what seems like a proto-''Jackass" stupid human trick is really a terrifying worst-case scenario for a car-less life in L.A.

That collection also includes the obligatory clip by Michel Gondry (the endlessly fascinating 1997 classic for Cibo Matto's ''Sugar Water," a split-screen palindrome). He and Jonze are the Braque and Picasso of music video. But the ''best of" program goes further afield. Rather than include a ton of pieces by those two, there are three from the London animation quartet Shynola: Radiohead's ''Pyramid Song," featuring a vast drowned world, Quannum's ''I Changed My Mind," and best of all, UNKLE's ''Eye for an Eye." Shynola specializes in a science fiction that's perched on the fault line between daydream and nightmare. ''Eye for an Eye" erases the line.

The entire video is colored the pink of blood that won't wash out of a white shirt. Little marshmallow men with little suction cups on their big heads inhabit the clip's Eden. Suddenly, a fleet of jets hauls in a massive marshmallow man covered in nipples that perfectly fit the little guys' suction cups. The ensuing feeding frenzy turns grisly and, when the marshmallows mutate into killer insects, we're introduced to a new color: black. Where Jonze and Gondry are fun fun fun, Shynola is creepily serious. Whatever their warning is, we ought to heed it.

Another terrific piece in the retrospective batch is Reuben Sutherland's 2005 clip for the Phoenix Foundation's ''Hitchcock." It's an eco-minded vehicular fantasia that's shot, initially, in silent-movie black and white, and winds up at an amusement park that could have fallen out of ''The Third Man."

The subsequent two collections are a mixed bag. All the inclusions are good, but the great videos make the good ones -- like the Martini Henry Rifles' ''Power Rangers" tribute ''Slash the Seats" -- seem mediocre. Still, the smart clips are very smart, indeed.

For instance, the two from the English electro-visual do-it-yourself duo Hexstatic are exceptional, particularly ''Salvador." The song's beat is contagious but the video's visual rhythm makes you want to dance, too.

Chris Cairns's video for LCD Soundsystem's ''Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" is a painstaking shout-out to Gondry's intricately choreographed video for Daft Punk's ''Around the World." Presumably Daft Punk was unavailable, but having the costumed characters from Gondry's video crash LCD's house party in stop-motion is an inspired plan B.

A problem that music videos for rock bands often encounter is what to do with the instruments. In his clip for ''100 mph" by the Glasgow quintet El Presidente, Rupert Jones boxes the band in. The members walk in and out of squares -- some too big, some too small, some just right. It's witty, live Pop Art that, along the way, crams El Presidente's drummer into a cube. She beats on anyway. Let's see Meg White do that!

It seems uninspired to point out that Spike Jonze makes the best contribution to the Fresh Tracks collection, but it's true. In the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' ''Y Control," singer Karen O and her band appear to be performing at the most exuberantly sick 10-year-old birthday party ever. It's in part a tribute to Luis Bunuel's 1929 silent ''Un Chien Andalou." The setting is a dank parking garage, and Jonze's lighting is cheap horror-movie stuff that catches a dozen or so kids wilding out. They bite Karen O's neck, bust through walls, axe off a hand, rip out intestines, and do a ritual dance around a dead dog. One kid scribbles on the wall, ''We are going to hell." Dude, it looks like you're already there.

Jonze has another winner in Mirrorball's ''Global Selection" program. For ''Triumph of a Heart," he's reunited with Bjork, and it feels so good. She hits a bar with her girlfriends after a spat with her man (well-played by a real house cat), and the song's ornate backing tracks fall away and the drunken patrons take up the slack by impersonating the instruments and vocals on the spot. She and the cat make up, then do a dance. It's marvelously sincere nonsense.

Still, this is the least successful of the three programs. One mystery is the limited scope. The globe here appears to be not much bigger than the US and the UK. There's one jingly German entry and two from Japan, where most of the music videos are somewhere on the cutting edge. One, Alex & Liane's video for Hanayo's ''Joe Le Taxi," is a stab at freakishness that never penetrates. It's over before it really gets going. The other -- Nagi Noda's video for Yuki's ''Sentimental Journey" -- is a handmade masterpiece and worth whatever you pay to see it on the MFA's screen.

Yuki is a big Japanese pop star. Here she acts girlish in a pink dress on a soundstage beside a country mural. The camera closes in, drifts backward, and from behind Yuki a dozen live versions of her step out and stand seemingly frozen in place. As the camera slowly pans left and backward in one long take, we see there are dozens more ''frozen" Yukis tracing a path to a country shack. The visual effect is like human dominoes in mid-topple, or a flipbook, reconstructed page by page, without the pages, just lots of girls standing impossibly still. Noda holds on to the artifice until the amazing final seconds. More American divettes should consider a clip this deceptively daring. Michel Gondry would tip his hat.

It's not entirely downhill from Yuki and Bjork. It's fun watching the lads of Scenario Rock's do battle bad guitars in Rozan & Schmeltz's snazzy clip for ''Skitzo Dancer." Martin De Thurah's punk kids in his exciting video for Carpark North's ''Human" are tough, and he films them to seem borderline grotesque, but the boys and girls in ''Y Control" would eat them for lunch. The most touching clip in this batch is the Dissociatives' ''Young Man, Old Man" from James Hackett. It's a vibrant pictorial collage whose parts seemed dismantled, then reassembled. The band's duo looks like the Tin Man and Scarecrow making their way through a field of mechanical crops. The sad song is handsomely married to the pseudo-bucolic imagery. It's poetry.

And like a good poem, the best videos make you want to see them again the second they're over. The downside, of course, to these Mirrorball shows is their evanescence. There's no going back, which feels tragic. Rather than run from the MFA back to our living rooms, we're forced to replay these videos in the MTV of our minds.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.