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

NICK RAY (pictured on right) - This is Nick Ray's centenary. Hard to believe. Why? Because of all the great American filmmakers, Ray is the one whose work many of us associate most powerfully with youth. Ray began as a poet of youthful intensity and longing, desperation and alienation, with They Live By Night and continued with Rebel without a Cause (Ray, James Dean and Elia Kazan, who made East of Eden, also in blazing color and Cinemascope, the year before, more or less created a template for American youth culture). In fact, you feel that intense longing just as acutely in the pictures that aren't about young people. The heroes of Ray's pictures are searching, looking for someone or some place to help them recover a sense of wholeness - a sense of home. It's an impossible quest, but the dream of fulfilling the quest haunts Robert Ryan's cop in On Dangerous Ground and Humphrey Bogart's screenwriter in In a Lonely Place, both violent men, or Robert Mitchum's rootless cowboy in The Lusty Men (in the opening scene, there's a very moving moment when Mitchum revisits his old family home, reaches under the front steps and finds his old toy). And it obsesses James Mason in the harrowing Bigger Than Life. TCM is showing almost everything by Ray throughout the month, and two highlights are a new documentary, Don't Expect Too Much, by his wife Susan, and a newly restored version of his last picture, made with his students, appropriately titled We Can't Go Home Again. All of Ray's pictures are worth exploring, even the minor or less successful ones. And the films mentioned above, in addition to Johnny Guitar, Party Girl, Bitter Victory, and the rarely seen Wind Across the Everglades, seem to have become more resonant and stirring with the passing of time.

JOHN ALTON - John Alton, one of the greatest cinematographers who ever lived, was born in Hungary at the turn of the century. He emigrated to New York when he was a teenager and fell into the film business as an extra, then as a lab technician, and he did his first camera work for Ernst Lubitsch, filming European backgrounds for The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg. He moved to Buenos Aires in the early 30s to design the first Argentine sound studio, and that's where he developed his craft as a DP on pictures like Luis Saslavsky's Crimen a las tres, a lost crime melodrama that apparently anticipates the pictures he later made in Hollywood. When Alton returned to Hollywood, he went to work at small studios like Republic and Monogram, and then with the independent producer Edward Small. It was with Small that Alton first teamed with Anthony Mann, and their work together attracted the attention of MGM, where Alton made many different kinds of films, each one visually remarkable. "It's not what you light, it's what you don't light," Alton wrote in his wonderful book Painting with Light, and the statement is born out in all six of the pictures TCM is showing on October 19th. With Mann and Vincente Minnelli (TCM is showing 2 titles by each), he was matched by directors with visual imaginations as rich as his own, but anything photographed by Alton is an event. He was a great artist.

by Martin Scorsese