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.

For at least fifty years, the work of Stan­ley Kubrick has con­sti­tut­ed an ide­al object of study for seri­ous cinephiles. Now that the tech­no­log­i­cal democ­ra­ti­za­tion of the past decade has allowed some of the most seri­ous cinephiles to become video essay­ists, that study has flow­ered into a host of mini-doc­u­men­taries close­ly exam­in­ing the tech­niques of all of film his­to­ry’s most scru­ti­niz­able auteurs. The sub­field of Kubrick-themed video essay­ism recent­ly reached a new high water­mark with film­mak­er Cameron Beyl’s five-part, three-hour Direc­tors Series study of the man’s life and work.

“Every liv­ing film­mak­er today works under the shad­ow of Stan­ley Kubrick,” says Beyl in his nar­ra­tion toward the end of the series. “His roller-coast­er ride of a career last­ed 45 years and spanned two con­ti­nents, leav­ing four­teen fea­tures and count­less inno­va­tions in its wake.

In mak­ing his films, Kubrick ulti­mate­ly want­ed to change the form of cin­e­ma itself. His explo­ration of alter­na­tive sto­ry struc­tures and new forms of expres­sion result­ed in sev­er­al ground­break­ing con­tri­bu­tions to the devel­op­ment of the craft itself.”

If you want to find out much more about the nature of those ground­break­ing con­tri­bu­tions, block out the time and watch Beyl’s analy­ses of each peri­od of Kubrick­’s career: the time of his ear­ly inde­pen­dent fea­tures (Fear & Desire, Killer’s Kiss, The Killing), the Kirk Dou­glas years (Paths of Glo­ry and Spar­ta­cus), the Peter Sell­ers come­dies (Loli­ta and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb), the mas­ter­works (2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clock­work Orange, Bar­ry Lyn­don, and The Shin­ing), and the final fea­tures (Full Met­al Jack­et and Eyes Wide Shut.)

The project leaves no aspect of Kubrick­’s mas­tery unmen­tioned: his painstak­ing research habits, his much-dis­cussed take-after-take-after-take shoot­ing method on set, his care­ful method of dis­cov­er­ing each film’s form in the edit­ing room, his eager­ness to incor­po­rate new tech­nol­o­gy into his pro­duc­tions, and his fin­ished pic­tures’ simul­ta­ne­ous embod­i­ment and sub­ver­sion of genre. It makes us ask the obvi­ous but seem­ing­ly unan­swer­able ques­tion: who’s the next Stan­ley Kubrick? But Beyl actu­al­ly has an answer, and one that has become the sub­ject of his next series, already in progress: David Finch­er. The direc­tor of The Game, Fight Club, and The Social Net­work has big shoes to fill —  or so he’ll real­ize even more clear­ly if he watch­es the Kubrick series him­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The Shin­ing and Oth­er Com­plex Stan­ley Kubrick Films Recut as Sim­ple Hol­ly­wood Movies

Lost Kubrick: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick’s Unfin­ished Films

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Explore the Mas­sive Stan­ley Kubrick Exhib­it at the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

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

Like many film fans, I grew up famil­iar with the term “Spaghet­ti west­ern,” but I’d near­ly reached adult­hood before fig­ur­ing out what, exact­ly, Amer­i­ca’s most pop­u­lar Ital­ian dish had to do with Amer­i­ca’s once-most pop­u­lar movie genre. But even if they don’t know the spe­cif­ic def­i­n­i­tion of a Spaghet­ti west­ern, those who enjoy them know a Spaghet­ti west­ern when they see one. Ser­gio Leone’s A Fist­ful of Dol­lars, For a Few Dol­lars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci’s Min­neso­ta Clay and Djan­go; Enzo Bar­boni’s They Call Me Trin­i­ty and Trin­i­ty Is Still My Name — if a pic­ture belongs in that com­pa­ny, nobody doubts it.

You’ll notice that all those direc­tors have Ital­ian names, and indeed, west­ern all’i­tal­iana, the Ital­ian equiv­a­lent of “Spaghet­ti west­ern,” sim­ply means “Ital­ian-style west­ern.” These Ital­ian-pro­duced tales of the law­less 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can west, some­times fea­tur­ing fad­ing or ris­ing Hol­ly­wood stars (as with the young Clint East­wood, who would become iden­ti­fied with Leone’s “Man with No Name”), and often shot in the Span­ish desert, rode high from the mid-1960s to the ear­ly 70s, bring­ing a fresh sen­si­bil­i­ty and vis­cer­al impact which had for the most part drained out of the home­grown vari­ety.

Trust a genre-lov­ing auteur like Quentin Taran­ti­no (and one who made his very own Djan­go a few years back) to know Spaghet­ti west­erns inside and out. While even those of us who nev­er turn down the chance to enjoy a good Spaghet­ti west­ern might strug­gle to name ten of them, Taran­ti­no can eas­i­ly run down his per­son­al top twen­ty:

1. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Ser­gio Leone, 1966)
2. For a Few Dol­lars More (Ser­gio Leone, 1965)
3. Djan­go (Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci, 1966)
4. The Mer­ce­nary (Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci, 1966)
5. Once Upon a Time in the West (Ser­gio Leone, 1968)
6. A Fist­ful of Dol­lars (Ser­gio Leone, 1964)
7. Day of Anger (Toni­no Valerii, 1967)
8. Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967)
9. Nava­jo Joe (Ser­gio Corbucci,1966)
10. The Return of Ringo (Duc­cio Tes­sar, 1965)
11. The Big Gun­down (Ser­gio Sol­li­ma, 1966)
12. A Pis­tol for Ringo (Duc­cio Tes­sari, 1965)
13. The Dirty Out­laws (Fran­co Ros­set­ti, 1967)
14. The Great Silence (Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci, 1968)
15. The Grand Duel (Gian­car­lo San­ti, 1972)
16. Shoot the Liv­ing, Pray for the Dead (Giuseppe Vari, 1971)
17. Tepepa (Giulio Petroni, 1968)
18. The Ugly Ones (Euge­nio Mar­tin, 1966)
19. Viva Djan­go! (Fer­di­nan­do Bal­di, 1967)
20. Machine Gun Killers (Pao­lo Bian­chi­ni, 1968)

You can watch all the trail­ers of these Spaghet­ti west­ern mas­ter­pieces in the playlist above, cre­at­ed by The Spaghet­ti West­ern Data­base. Some may now strike you as dis­arm­ing­ly straight­for­ward about bal­ly­hoo­ing the excite­ment promised by the fea­ture they adver­tise, and you may find oth­ers sur­pris­ing­ly fun­ny and more self-aware. While I defy any­one to watch the entire playlist of trail­ers with­out want­i­ng to dive into this sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle-explored tra­di­tion, noth­ing gets me quite as excit­ed about watch­ing a movie — old or new, sub­tle or schlocky, genre or oth­er­wise — as Taran­ti­no’s con­ta­gious cinephil­ia.

via The Spaghet­ti West­ern Data­base

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Hal­loween & More

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

Quentin Tarantino’s Hand­writ­ten List of the 11 “Great­est Movies”

Watch John Wayne Star in 25 Clas­sic West­erns: All Free Online

The Great Train Rob­bery: Where West­erns Began

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