In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese.

The Story of G. I. Joe (September 11, 9:30am) The Woman on the Beach (September 21, 12am) The Night of the Hunter (September 11, 1:30pm) The Shooting (September 6, 3:45am)--In the '60s, those of us who loved movies started to hear and read the word "auteur." It turned up more and more in the reviews we read and the conversations we were having. It's interesting to remember that we needed a French word--"auteur" as opposed to "author," which would have felt too literary (it came from the French critics at Cahiers du Cinéma, many of whom later became filmmakers). It was a way of raising people's consciousness of cinema and helping everyone to understand that it could take many different forms. Cinema was Bergman and Fellini, it was Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage, it was Elia Kazan and George Stevens, but it was also Budd Boetticher and Edgar G. Ulmer. This developed into an approach called "auteurism." At the time, it was all about what was and wasn't "personal." After making quite a few pictures myself and considering these issues now, I think it comes down to this: did the person behind the camera need to make the movie? Did they use anything and everything at their disposal to get the story they wanted to tell and the feelings and intuitions they wanted to convey up there on the screen? Could they have just as well not made the movie? These issues have come up quite often in this column, because they're fundamentally tied to another very basic question: what is cinema? Looking over the September lineup, a few random titles come to mind: you see these titles and say, "That's cinema." For instance, The Story of G.I. Joe, a very special, independently produced movie made by William Wellman, a veteran director who had been severely injured in WWI, based on the dispatches of WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle: the effort to capture the exhaustion and the resignation and the fatalism for the people fighting on the front lines is quite remarkable. It's a lovingly crafted, kind of handmade picture, and it was a great success. The Woman on the Beach, made two years later, was not. It started life with Fritz Lang, then fell into Val Lewton's hands, and wound up as Jean Renoir's last American picture. It was severely cut by RKO but the finished film is unusually compelling, a brooding, mysterious love triangle that aches with jealousy and obsession. Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, now a classic, was also a box-office failure at the time of its release, and part of that had to do with the fact that it was and still is such an individual picture on absolutely every level, a true vision. As is Monte Hellman's The Shooting, a Western written by Carole Eastman made back to back with another Western, Ride in the Whirlwind, on one extremely low budget--it's a mysterious, unsettling picture that operates on an extremely unusual wavelength, a picture with its own special pulse. These are four very different American movies, made under a range of circumstances, and they have just the kind of individual ambition that seems increasingly rare, and it needs to be celebrated.

by Martin Scorsese