When you watch a director’s work long enough, you pick up on his/her signature tricks — the themes and camera work that appear again and again. Last month, a YouTuber who goes by the name “Kogonada” created Wes Anderson // FROM ABOVE, a montage capturing Anderson’s penchant for the aerial shot, a move that contributes to the lightness, playfulness and quirkiness of his films.

Now “Kogonada” returns and looks at Quentin Tarantino’s work from a new angle — from below. The view from below has two advantages. It puts the actor in a position of clear dominance, and it lets the viewer know that violence has taken place, without actually having to show the damage done. For someone like Tarantino, it’s a handy way to go… H/T @webacion

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When The Artist won the top Oscar on Sunday night, critic Roger Ebert compared it to an episode of The Twilight Zone. “The Academy Award for best picture went to a silent film in black and white,” he wrote. “Its victory will send Hollywood back to its think tanks.”

In this short film by Joe LaMattina of Last Call With Carson Daly, the writer and director of The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius, talks about the challenge of holding an audience’s attention without dialogue, and the magic that happens when it’s done right. “There’s a very interesting process with silent movies,” Hazanavicius says. “The black and white and the lack of sound creates a mystery.”

The Artist has taught audiences in the 21st century that silent films can be a delight. If you would like to explore some of the great films from the golden age of silent cinema, visit our collection of 100 Free Silent Films: The Great Classics, which includes works by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst and many more. They’re all part of our bigger meta collection of Free Movies.

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You might know Errol Morris from his documentaries like Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, on emergent systems in topiary gardens and naked mole-rat colonies; The Fog of War, on the shadowy career of Robert McNamara; and Gates of Heaven, on competing pet cemeteries (which no less a critical authority than Roger Ebert has called one of the greatest films of all time). You might remember Morris’ interview-driven television series First Person with fondness — and, given its episodes on serial-killer groupies, cryonic head-freezers, and professional high-school students, perhaps a dash of disbelief. If nothing else, you’ve almost certainly seen Morris’ commercials for the likes of PBS, Volkswagen, and Miller High Life. In the last few years, he’s put out a new film, Tabloid, a book on the relationship of photography to reality, Believing is Seeing, and many a post on his New York Times blog. For Errol Morris fans, these are hearty times indeed.

As the newest addition to this Morissian abundance, the ten-minute documentary El Wingador profiles five-time Philadelphia Wing Bowl champion eater Bill “El Wingador” Simmons. To win the Wing Bowl, you must simply eat as many chicken wings as possible in the shortest amount of time. Such a mandate stretches the definition of “eat” to its breaking point; the trick, as Simmons tells Morris, is to train your jaw and esophagus not to chew, per se, but to bite and swallow, bite and swallow, bite and swallow — “don’t worry about choking.” For a man like El Wingador, eating, like any everyday activity taken to the level of elite competition, makes demands that would strike outsiders as grotesque: consuming eleven pounds of food per day, putting in hours-long sessions with baseball-sized wads of Tootsie Rolls, shoveling down handfuls of searing-hot pizza cheese, gnawing on rawhide bones meant for German Shepherds. And sometimes even insiders seem flummoxed by it all: asked if he would really consider his regimen an eating disorder, Simmons replies, “It’s gotta be a disorder, ‘cause it’s crazy, man.”

As a seemingly marginal subculture with its own rules, customs, hierarchies, and personalities, competitive eating would seem to comfortably inhabit Morris’ wheelhouse; it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d opted to make a feature-length documentary about it. But even in the brief minutes with Simmons El Wingador offers us, we glimpse enough of this world and its leading lights — the young hotshot Joey Chestnut, the eerily skinny Sonya Thomas and Takeru Kobayashi — to suspect that the substantive differences between competitive eating and “real” athletics may amount to less than we’d assumed. One might make a solemn point here about starvation in the developing world even as the Philadelphia Wing Bowl puts decadent ancient Rome to shame. But it gives me just as much pause to ponder the unsettling lack of differences between cramming chicken wings down your throat in the center of a roaring stadium and most other forms of human endeavor.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

By the French New Wave’s standards, François Truffaut made films with a startling straightforwardness. Yet something about the man’s entire body of work feeds the sneaking suspicion that, no matter how many times you’ve watched everything in it, you’ve never gazed upon its depths. This applies equally to his beloved, obliquely autobiographical The 400 Blows and its sequels, his well-known pictures like Fahrenheit 451 and Jules and Jim, and the Small Changes and Mississippi Mermaids of the world that few seem to watch today outside of revival screenings. Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut’s cinematic colleague and one-time friend, ultimately dismissed nearly everything in Truffaut’s filmography as nothing more than “stories.” Every cinephile must go through a moment of temptation to do the same, but the films have a way of haunting you into revisitation after revisitation — just like, say, Alfred Hitchcock’s. No wonder those two had so much to talk about.

Les Mistons, the second short film Truffaut ever made and the first that ever satisfied him, showcases these qualities in miniature. A teenage girl named Bernadette, skirt flying in the wind, bicycles across the countryside for a rendezvous with her strapping gentleman friend. This presents a fine opportunity for a quintet of mischief-minded prepubescent boys. Obscurely tormented by the older woman’s desirability and their own inability to process it, they follow her around day after day, sometimes tormenting her, sometimes helpfully fetching her tennis balls, but usually just staring. They might spend one afternoon playing cops-and-robbers; they might spend another getting beaten up by the object of their quasi-affection’s boyfriend. They lead rich lives, these rambunctious, short-shorted, early 20th-century petits écoliers.

Then the narrator, a now-grown member of this comically harmless gang, remembers the central event: the man who has become Bernadette’s fiancée has perished in a mountain-climbing accident. This leads to the quintessential Truffaut moment, elegiac yet faintly troubling, that is Les Mistons’ last: months after the incident, the boys happen upon a darkly dressed Bernadette strolling stiffly down the road. Hiding behind a wall, they stare as she passes and disappears from view. Experienced Truffaut-watchers should also note, of all things, the visual effects. Early examples of the filmmaker’s light but selective touch appear in the slow-motion kiss one boy plants on Bernadette’s bicycle seat and the reverse motion that allows another to rise from his imaginary death and re-enter his imaginary gunfight. Almost everyone operating in the creative space blown open by the French New Wave could do this sort of thing, of course, but few besides Truffaut could do it — or would even consider doing it – in the service of understatement.

Find Les Mistons in our collection of Free Movies Online.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.