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 in January 2011.

JACK CARDIFF - Jack Cardiff, who passed away in 2009 at the age of 94, was a revolutionary figure in the history of cinema, first as a Camera Operator and then as a Director of Photography. If any one person can be credited with bringing color to movies, it's Cardiff. Herbert Kalmus was the man who invented Technicolor, but along with Disney and his animators and a few American cinematographers like Leon Shamroy, Cardiff was the first one to bring the process under control, to make it come to life, and in his hands it became a real artistic tool. When I think of how heavy and cumbersome and unreliable the Technicolor equipment was, how difficult it must have been to control the image, my admiration for Cardiff only increases. TCM is showing 19 pictures throughout the month on which Cardiff worked as either an operator, a DP or a director. I love the 1939 version of The Four Feathers and Albert Lewin's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, and I have a real fondness for many of the pictures he directed, including two of the titles included here, The Lion and Dark of the Sun. But the four pictures that Cardiff made with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger--The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes--are among the most powerful experiences in the history of the art form.

MAX OPHÜLS IN HOLLYWOOD - Max Ophüls was one of the greatest of the European émigré directors who flooded into Hollywood from the '20s through the '40s. Some of them, like Ophüls and Jean Renoir, had a tough time. John Ford, who greatly admired Renoir, once said, "He's not one of us." Meaning, he couldn't adapt to the American system. The same could be said of Ophüls, who made only four films in Hollywood (he also labored for quite a while on Vendetta for Howard Hughes, from which he was fired), and he had a very difficult time on the first two, where his production pace and fluidly choreographed unbroken takes unnerved the studio heads. He never really did adapt to Hollywood (or maybe it's that Hollywood never adapted to him), but those four films are extraordinary achievements, each one with its own unique power and energy. Letter from an Unknown Woman is the closest to Ophüls' European pictures, and just as devastating. Caught and The Reckless Moment are remarkable, extremely subtle studies in paranoia, power, and the strange currents of feeling that can develop between people at the oddest moments (the former features a great performance by Robert Ryan as a reclusive millionaire based on Howard Hughes). The Exile is a melancholy swashbuckler, visually exquisite. A great piece of programming, not to be missed.

DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID - TCM is also showing Renoir's rarely seen adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's novel Diary of a Chambermaid, later remade by Luis Buñuel, starring Paulette Goddard and her then-husband Burgess Meredith (who also wrote the script) as a maid who tries to insinuate herself within the treacherous world of a French bourgeois family in the 1880s (Renoir back-dated the period in order to evoke his father's paintings). It is the darkest and strangest of his American work. I'll leave it to the great French critic André Bazin to describe this unusual picture: "Diary is a slapstick tragedy. It merges burlesque with atrocity."

by Martin Scorsese