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 FILM (Mondays and Tuesdays, 8pm)-- There are a few films this month being shown in conjunction with Mark Cousins' epic documentary series The Story of Film. Many official histories of cinema have been weighted toward Hollywood, but this series pays close and careful attention to what was happening all over the world. I'm happy that film history has become more inclusive, because when you see everything in light of Hollywood you get a very narrow sense of storytelling with images and sounds; on the other hand, once you've been exposed to pictures made in different parts of the world, you can take a fresh look at American movies and find them exciting in unexpected ways.

In comparison with what was being made in Hollywood in 1959, Robert Bresson's Pickpocket is extremely unorthodox, but I suppose that Bresson's pictures look unorthodox in comparison with everything else around them. Why? First of all, Bresson cast only non-actors and directed them in a very particular way--flat line readings and gestures, a concentration on rhythm, movements that seem to have been learned as if they were ballets. People have often focused on what's not there in Bresson's films--namely, acting--but that's to miss what is there. Bresson encourages you to tune into another level of being: the story of a young man turning to a life of crime becomes a spiritual drama in which the hero hides away from humanity because he's hiding from himself and his true feelings. Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light, made a few years later, is a very different kind of spiritual drama, very powerfully acted; where Bresson creates the conditions that allow the spiritual life to be felt through actions and sounds and silences, Bergman dramatizes the spiritual depletion of a minister in a small Swedish village, one agonizing shuffle, grimace and exchange at a time. I believe that this was the fourth film Bergman made with the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and every image appears to have been etched in glass--you come away remembering every surface, every face (faces in Bergman are like landscapes), every patch of light.

Mikail Kalatozov and Sergei Urusevsky were another extraordinary director/cinematographer team, and they reached dizzying heights with the 1964 I Am Cuba, a Soviet production about the Cuban revolution (written by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko). I'll never forget the first time I saw this picture in the '90s--it had been commissioned by the Soviets and then condemned for excessive formalism and locked away. It was, and still is, like nothing I've ever seen before: the camera is in almost constant motion, and it floats through the action as a character in its own right; the black and white images are so sharp that at times you feel as if you're looking at an x-ray of the action. I Am Cuba is one of the great hallucinatory poems of the cinema.

Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl, made two years later in Senegal, is an altogether different kind of experience. In just under an hour, we observe another kind of spiritual depletion, that of a young Senegalese woman who takes a job with a French family to "better" herself and sees her best hopes fade into thin air as she goes from day to day, enduring increasingly harsh criticisms from her employers, in images of the greatest simplicity, and privately narrates her humiliations to herself.

These are four great pictures, in black and white, from different points on the globe, each with its own absolutely unique approach to cinema.

by Martin Scorsese