In the clip above, Mar­tin Scors­ese talks about a group of films that, in his words, have “enriched me, edu­cat­ed me, dis­turbed me, moved me in a way that have awak­ened me to new pos­si­bil­i­ties in cin­e­ma.” Those words will remind many of us of our expe­ri­ences with Scors­ese’s own pic­tures, which rais­es a big ques­tion: what move­ment could pos­si­bly have enough pow­er to enrich, edu­cate, dis­turb, move, and cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly awak­en a man who has done so much enrich­ing, edu­cat­ing, dis­turb­ing, mov­ing, and cin­e­mat­ic awak­en­ing him­self?

Scors­ese speaks of the cin­e­ma of South Korea, espe­cial­ly the wave that, over the past twen­ty years, has brought the glob­al film scene such auteurs as Park Chan-wook (Joint Secu­ri­ty Area, Old­boy, Stok­er), Lee Chang-dong (Oasis, Secret Sun­shine, Poet­ry), and Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Sum­mer, Fall, Win­ter… and Spring, 3‑Iron, Pietà). But he adds that, “for me, there’s some­thing espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing about the films of Hong Sang­soo. It’s got to do with his mas­ter­ful sense of sto­ry­telling. In each of his films that I’ve man­aged to see, every­thing kind of starts unas­sum­ing­ly” — but then things “unpeel like an orange.”

Only in one respect can I com­pare myself to Mar­tin Scors­ese: a love of Hong Sang­soo movies. I even wrote an essay for The Quar­ter­ly Con­ver­sa­tion a few years back try­ing to explain the artistry of this most pro­lif­ic Kore­an direc­tor, who has put out six­teen alco­hol-soaked, cig­a­rette-cloud­ed, social and sex­u­al awk­ward­ness-sat­u­rat­ed fea­tures to date. Some call Hong “the Kore­an Woody Allen,” which gets at the fact that his many come­dies of man­ners pass through more moods than com­e­dy and deal with more than man­ners, but that does­n’t cap­ture his pen­chant for rich for­mal and struc­tur­al exper­i­men­ta­tion — sto­ries told mul­ti­ple times, through dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, using clash­ing sets of facts, and so on — which delights cinephiles every­where.

This has made Hong a big name on the fes­ti­val cir­cuit — he usu­al­ly has a project or two mak­ing the rounds at any giv­en time — on which his lat­est movie Hill of Free­dom received much crit­i­cal acclaim. Telling of a Japan­ese man’s trip to Seoul to track down his Kore­an ex-girl­friend through a dis­or­dered pile of let­ters he sent her all at once, the most­ly Eng­lish-lan­guage movie shows the inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of not just Hong’s appeal, but of his work itself. It allows few of its char­ac­ters to speak their native lan­guage, result­ing in the kind of mean­ing­ful inar­tic­u­la­cy that he’d pre­vi­ous­ly had to get his all-Kore­an casts drunk to achieve.

You can take the plunge into Hong’s cut-up and metic­u­lous­ly rearranged cin­e­mat­ic world of inept, jeal­ous­ly ide­al­is­tic men, women that I’ve else­where described as “eeri­ly unre­pen­tant stud­ies in blank cal­cu­la­tion and frigid pli­a­bil­i­ty,” and the cat­a­stro­phes into which they lead them­selves by start­ing with his debut The Day the Pig Fell into a Well, avail­able free on the Kore­an Film Archive’s Youtube chan­nel.

I recent­ly went to Korea to record a pod­cast inter­view with Seoul-based film schol­ar Marc Ray­mond about how Hong’s films reflect mod­ern Kore­an life. It turns out they reflect it pret­ty well, some­thing I’ll see for myself lat­er this year when, after hav­ing stud­ied the Kore­an lan­guage for near­ly a decade, I move to Korea — all out of an inter­est first stoked by Hong Sang­soo.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 98 Kore­an Fea­ture Films Free Online, Thanks to the Kore­an Film Archive

The Five Best North Kore­an Movies: Watch Them Free Online

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films for a Young Film­mak­er

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

It’s not sur­pris­ing per­haps that we are in a film nerd super­cut gold­en age. After all, all film stu­dents have access to video edit­ing soft­ware, almost all movies are avail­able dig­i­tal­ly, and web­sites, like this one, are per­pet­u­al­ly hun­gry for new con­tent. Great super­cuts reveal some­thing new or unno­ticed about a great direc­tor, like how Yasu­jiro Ozu uses hall­ways or Kubrick favors one-point per­spec­tive. Edi­tor Jacob T. Swin­ney, who won the inter­net last month with his video “First and Final Frames,” just released the third out of a promised four-part super­cut on Quentin Taran­ti­no.

The direc­tor of Pulp Fic­tion and Death Proof is, of course, known for his dia­logue – razor-sharp, obscen­i­ty-laden repar­tee crammed with ref­er­ences to pop cul­ture or obscure movies. What is a Taran­ti­no movie with­out a rant about the true mean­ing of “Like a Vir­gin,” say, or a lengthy dis­course on the dif­fer­ence between McDonald’s menus in Amer­i­can and in Europe? Swin­ney strips away all that dia­logue to explore some of the recur­ring visu­al and audi­al motifs that lard Tarantino’s films. What you real­ize after watch­ing these is just how styl­ized his movies are. Taran­ti­no loves expres­sion­is­tic sound effects, flashy insert shots, gen­er­al­ly aping the look and feel of his cin­e­mat­ic heroes like Ser­gio Leone or King Hu. You can watch the first film above and the next two below.

The first film called “Hear­ing Taran­ti­no” is about all the pun­gent, styl­ized sounds the QT has used. As you can imag­ine, there are lots of gur­gling of blood and clank­ing of swords. What you might not have noticed is how many car­toony whoosh­es and zings he has fold­ed into the sound mix.

The sec­ond vid, “Tarantino’s Extreme Close Ups,” shows lots of eyes bear­ing expres­sions some­where along the ter­ri­fied-pissed off spec­trum.

And the third piece, “Taran­ti­no: Dri­ving Shots,” shows just how much of his movies take place in cars.

The fourth film has yet to come out, but I hope it’s on Tarantino’s not-at-all creepy obses­sion with women’s feet. You can prob­a­bly fill a cou­ple min­utes just on Uma Thur­man’s alone.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Taran­ti­no Tells You About The Actors & Direc­tors Who Pro­vid­ed the Inspi­ra­tion for “Reser­voir Dogs”

Watch Free Online My Best Friend’s Birth­day, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Mike Leigh works like few oth­er direc­tors. While most movies start with the script, Leigh devel­ops a sto­ry and char­ac­ters with his actors dur­ing long rehearsals. Leigh then assem­bles these exer­cis­es into a script. He will shoot some of that script and then rehearse some more. The result of this unusu­al style is that the actors know their char­ac­ters down to the mar­row. The film feels alive.

Back in 1975, just as Leigh was begin­ning to devel­op his famed method, the BBC com­mis­sioned him to make a series of five-minute movies. Leigh described the con­cept of the assign­ment to writer Sean O’Sullivan:

I thought it was a crack­ing idea, and I would have done forty of them or fifty – so you’d see them all the time, and some­times you might see a char­ac­ter you nev­er saw again, some­times you might see some­body pop­ping up for a moment and then be a main char­ac­ter in anoth­er one, or there’d be a cou­ple of ones that would run on to a nar­ra­tive. It would be a whole micro­cosm of the world. There was debate about whether they should be shown at the same time or they should be dot­ted around the chan­nel, like cur­rants in the pud­ding, as Tony Gar­nett, the pro­duc­er, called it.

The project, sad­ly, was can­celed before it even aired and only five movies were made. Those five were not broad­cast until 1982 when Leigh had already become a big name in British tele­vi­sion.

In some of his best works like Life is Sweet and Naked, Leigh focused on the small dra­mas of work­ing class life, min­ing the unar­tic­u­lat­ed sad­ness and anger sim­mer­ing just beneath the sur­face of mod­ern Britain. His Five-Minute Films show ear­ly glim­mers of his lat­er great­ness.

The plot of the first film, The Birth of the Goalie of the 2001 F.A. Cup Final, is sim­ple to an extreme. The short, which con­sists of ten vignettes span­ning a half-dozen years, is about a cou­ple decid­ing whether or not to have a baby. The name­less bloke repeat­ed­ly asks his reluc­tant part­ner, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a kid?” At the end of the movie, he’s kick­ing the ball around with his young son. The end. It is almost as if Leigh want­ed to see how lit­tle back­sto­ry and char­ac­ter psy­chol­o­gy he could get away with.

The sec­ond film, Old Chums, is the dia­met­ri­cal oppo­site to the first – it’s all about char­ac­ter. The sto­ry, which unfolds in real-time, shows Bri­an, who is dis­abled and in crutch­es, walk­ing to the car as he par­ries the con­ver­sa­tion­al onslaught of a boor­ish ex-school­mate, Ter­ry. The movie buries you in names and long past events that have lit­tle bear­ing on the sto­ry, but leaves cen­tral ques­tions like “what does Ter­ry actu­al­ly want?” tan­ta­liz­ing­ly vague.

A third film, Pro­ba­tion, appears above. You can watch the remain­der of Leigh’s Five-Minute Shorts here. We’ll also add them to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tim Burton’s Ear­ly Stu­dent Films:King and Octo­pus & Stalk of the Cel­ery Mon­ster

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

David Finch­er is an auteur in the same way that Alfred Hitch­cock is — you can tell a Finch­er film from see­ing a sin­gle frame. His shots are col­ored with inky blacks and sick­ly flu­o­res­cent greens and they are always com­po­si­tion­al­ly per­fect. His cam­era moves with an eerie dis­em­bod­ied smooth­ness that makes a Kubrick film seem down right warm and invit­ing. His movies mine the murky recess­es of the human con­di­tion; you are more like­ly to see a gris­ly mur­der in a Finch­er movie than a pas­sion­ate kiss. Even movies that have a rel­a­tive­ly low body count, like The Social Net­work, are imbued with a dis­tinct­ly Finch­er­sque grim­ness.

A grow­ing num­ber of crit­ics are start­ing to pay atten­tion. Above you can see Tony Zhou illus­trate the director’s styl­is­tic restraint in a video essay called “And the Oth­er Way is Wrong.” Finch­er him­self once said, “They know you can do any­thing so the ques­tion is what don’t you do, not what do you do.” And Zhou ele­gant­ly shows what Finch­er does not do, which is such sta­ples of Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing as hand-held cam­eras and close ups. He likes his cam­era locked down and aloof.

In anoth­er video essay series, Aaron Aradil­las and the great Matt Zoller Seitz focus sim­ply on the open­ings of Fincher’s films. The series starts with Fincher’s first, and most maligned, movie Alien3. Aradil­las and Zoller Seitz argue that the film is dis­tinct­ly dif­fer­ent from the first two Alien films. Rid­ley Scott, direc­tor of Alien, kept the shots long and the edits large­ly invis­i­ble. Finch­er, in con­trast, used fast and jar­ring edits. He start­ed as a music video direc­tor and was still in MTV mode when he made Alien3.

In a lat­er episode on Zodi­ac, arguably his mas­ter­piece, Aradil­las and Zoller Seitz show that Finch­er bril­liant­ly packed the film’s two open­ing sequences with an impres­sive amount of expo­si­tion, set­ting up not just sto­ry ele­ments but also the film’s com­plex, sub­jec­tive point of view.

There are four videos in total in this series with a promise of a fifth. You can watch them all here.

Ear­li­er this week, we showed you Cameron Beyl’s five-part, three-hour Direc­tors Series study of Stan­ley Kubrick. Who is he tack­ling next? Finch­er, of course.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

Watch 7 New Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rush­more, The Roy­al Tenen­baums & More

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.