Free docs for you to watch

If you are feeling hungry for new free films then we are today able to offer you some movies about movies. We have one excellent feature documentary for you about the art of film editing, as well as a three-part series from that diminutive movie maestro Martin Scorsese.

The Cutting Edge, subtitled The Magic of Movie Editing, is a must-see for film fans. Wendy Apple's documentary finds major directors and their editing partners analysing key scenes from their movies, discussing the development of editing over the last century, and sharing cutting room anecdotes. Amongst the featured film-makers are Quentin Tarantino, Jodie Foster, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Sean Penn, Paul Verhoeven, Wes Craven, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. And it is that final director who is the pivotal figure in our second offering this afternoon.

1995 saw Scorsese revisiting familiar territory to hugely acclaimed effect. Reuniting with Goodfellas stars Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, as well as his co-writer on that movie Nick Pileggi, the director delivered another blood-spattered mob epic in the shape of Casino. And in the same year Scorsese also took another on-screen trip into his own past, as he teamed up with the British Film Institute to make A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. A three-part series of 70-minute documentaries, A Personal Journey finds the Raging Bull and Taxi Driver film-maker musing both on the development of cinema in the United States, and the movies that exerted a major influence on his own body of work.

Part 1 opens with Scorsese's reminiscences about the first film to profoundly affect him, King Vidor's Freudian western Duel in the Sun (dubbed “Lust in the Dust” at the time by a disapproving Church), before moving on to chronicle the genesis of classical American film-making. Particular attention is paid to the idea of cinema as a personal expression of the director, and the tension between this ideal and the often constrictive studio system, with reference being made to such self-reflexive Hollywood tales as Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels and Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful. Scorsese details the emergence of genre film-making, from such very early efforts as Edwin S. Porter's Great Train Robbery and D. W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley, to the westerns of John Ford and the Busby Berkeley-choreographed musicals, and on to more obscure movies, such as the gangster pictures I Walk Alone and Force of Evil. Featuring interviews with the likes of Clint Eastwood and Gregory Peck, Part 1 of A Personal Journey also contains extended clips from many of the referred-to films, including Raoul Walsh's High Sierra, Anthony Mann's The Furies, and Michael Curtiz' My Dream is Yours (the latter being a confessed inspiration for Scorsese's own New York, New York).

Part 2 offers a focus on the technology and craft of film-making, with Scorsese cataloguing the early silent directors' creation of a visual grammar. The 1913 Italian epic Cabiria, by Giovanni Pastrone, is featured, as is D. W Griffith's thematically incendiary but technically ground-breaking The Birth of a Nation, and the same director's later Intolerance, which ambitiously straddles four different eras in the telling of its story. Each fresh cinematic development is illustrated with a fascinating example – from the special effects of Cecil DeMille's 1923 The Ten Commandments, to the expressionism of F. W Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, to the vivid colour of Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, to the widescreen CinemaScope photography of Elia Kazan's East of Eden. Scorsese also looks at the evolution of the crime movie in the 1940s and '50s, as the old gangster pictures gave way to a more unsettling type of movie, film noir - with the likes of Scarlet Street by Fritz Lang, and Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder suggesting that, far from being confined to the gangland milieu, terrible evil lurked under the most banal of everyday facades. Part 2 of A Personal Journey includes interviews with Billy Widler, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, and clips from such movies as Joseph Lewis' Gun Crazy, Jacques Tourneur's Cat People and Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly.

Part 3 is all about the directors themselves, and the various routes adopted in order to convey their message to a cinema audience. Scorsese begins by looking at the subversives of the 1950s, who hid their political critiques in genre B-pictures (as Allan Dwan did with his anti-McCarthy western Silver Lode) or glossy dramas (as Douglas did with All That Heaven Allows and Nicholas Ray did with Bigger Than Life – both of which highlighted the flaws in the American suburban dream). Those with an interest in Scorsese's new asylum-set feature Shutter Island will no doubt be intrigued to hear him lavish praise upon Samuel Fuller's low-budget Shock Corridor, which revolves around a journalist locked up inside a mental institution. The final death of the studio system is touched upon too, with Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town being used to illustrate the new era of the runaway production, which saw American stars and directors decamping overseas to make their movies. Scorsese talks about those directors who tackled taboo or controversial subjects directly as well, with looks at Chaplin's The Great Dictator, which castigated and ridiculed Hitler while the USA was still holding back from joining World War II, and Citizen Kane, which saw Orson Welles taking on media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Part 3 of A Personal Journey contains interviews with Billy Wilder and Arthur Penn, and extended clips from the likes of Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and John Cassavetes' Faces.

The Cutting Edge is only available to view in the UK and Australia. A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies is only available to UK site users.