MOVIES : Mike Leigh, 20 Years of Moments : The early works of the British director, showing why he is one of a kind, will be screened at the AFI International Festival

The subject is British director Mike Leigh, and the conclusions defy categorization.

An overnight sensation who just happens to have 20 years of exceptional work behind him, a critical favorite whose films disconcert audiences almost as often as they delight them, the master of a revolutionary method of filmmaking who doggedly applies it, to borrow Jane Austen’s conceit, to nothing wider than the same little bit of well-worked ivory, Leigh seems to fit everywhere and nowhere. Audiences who went to see his latest pair of features, 1988’s “High Hopes” and last year’s “Life Is Sweet,” often seem curious about the man but uncertain. What is it he does, why and how does he do it, and why should anyone west of Cornwall really care?

If the cinematic groaning board that is the AFI International Film Festival does nothing else this year (just kidding), it provides definitive answers to any and all questions about Leigh. For, starting Tuesday and running through July 2, 10 of his earlier features, plus assorted short films, will be available for viewing at Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica. They are not to be missed.

Seeing all this work in a bunch makes clear what Leigh’s partisans have already surmised, that he is one of the most extraordinary directors working today, a wizard with words and actors who comes off as a subversive and sui generis combination of Karl and Groucho Marx with a humanistic slice of Anton Chekhov on the side.

To those who became aware of Leigh only after “Life Is Sweet” outshone the local heroes and was selected best picture of the year by the National Society of Film Critics, the very fact that he has 10 previous feature credits will come as something of a surprise. The explanation is that, except for “Bleak Moments,” his 1971 debut film, all of Leigh’s work before “High Hopes” was done for British television and never seen in this country, either on the big screen or the small.

Splendid though they are, it’s not surprising that Leigh’s films couldn’t manage theatrical financing or major studio interest. It’s not only (as will be seen) that his methodology involves casting a film before the script is written, but also that his style and subject matter are close to anathema as far as conventional box-office wisdom is concerned.

For one thing, as the heir to the socially conscious “kitchen sink” films like “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” “Room at the Top” and “This Sporting Life,” directed by Britain’s Angry Young Men of the 1950s and ‘60s, Leigh almost invariably sets his films among England’s struggling poor and is as alive as any Marxist to the stresses of an all-powerful class system that grinds down those who lead lives of not necessarily quiet desperation.

Not only are his settings dispiriting, but Leigh refuses to spiff them up with conventional plots. In fact, Leigh is so uninterested in anything resembling plot that his films are almost impossible to summarize once seen. What counts for him are episodes rather than storyline, sympathy rather than melodrama and, most of all, character and the human condition.

It is Leigh’s greatest strength, then, that rarely if ever has a filmmaker understood his subjects as intimately as he does his. As befits a director who has committed himself to “making films about the unextraordinary lives of ordinary people--and making them interesting and meaningful,” Leigh has a novelist’s concern for the way life is lived, for the endless variety of people’s anxieties, insecurities, foibles and fears.

When it comes to hearing and understanding the voices of the nominally inarticulate, to knowing how much people are saying when they don’t seem to be saying very much at all, Leigh is very much one of a kind. He has such an exact ear for the nuances of (invariably lower-class) speech, such a restless eye for the vagaries of interpersonal connection, the way people talk at each other without really communicating, that words like empathy barely describe what he is able to pull off.

Impressive as all of this is, it really doesn’t touch the key quality in Mike Leigh that is as unexpected as it is impressive. For far from being glum and humorless, as plot summaries might have you believe, his films have generous streaks of absurdity, of wild, chaotic humor in them. A director who confidently walks the almost invisible line between farce and heartbreak, Leigh fills his films with zany rogue moments, coming up with outlandish situations that, because he knows his people so well, feel not only perfectly natural but even inevitable once we get over the shock of experiencing them. As British critic John Russell Taylor nicely puts it, “Leigh’s art is . . . that of knowing how far one can go too far.”

So, when you think about Mike Leigh’s films, it is the characters that you remember, those absurdly Chekovian situations and scraps they get themselves into that linger in your mind. For instance:

- Alan Dixon (Richard Kane) in “Who’s Who,” a slavish worshiper of the peerage who spends his spare time collecting dismissive form letters from the upper classes (“royal refusals” he grandly calls them) and fondly remembering chance encounters with his betters, as in, “a charming man, he once asked me the way to the office toilet.”

- Trevor (David Threlfall), the young undertaker’s assistant in “The Kiss of Death,” a mop-haired goofball with a shambling walk who relates to the dead much better than the living and whose awkward, braying laugh is so irritatingly ill-timed that the urge to strangle him beautifully undermines your sympathy for his plight.

- Gloria (Brenda Bethlyn), the daft sister in “Grown-Ups,” truly the pest’s pest, who makes the life of a newly married couple a continual agony. When, in the film’s climax, Gloria has an emotional breakdown on a neighbor’s staircase, the desire to simultaneously howl with laughter and cringe in horror mark the interlude as one of the quintessential Mike Leigh moments.

No Mike Leigh moments at all would be possible without Leigh’s actors and the unique way he works with them. Over the course of 20 years, Leigh has both developed a stock company of performers (including his wife, actress Alison Steadman, and Timothy Spall, The Regret Rien’s unflappable proprietor) as well as given many of Britain’s top actors some of their first work. A very young Ben Kingsley, for instance, can be seen in “Hard Labour,” and Gary Oldman, Tim Roth and Alfred Molina effortlessly pal around together in “Meantime.”

A graduate of the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art as well as the London Film School, Leigh is at home in theater as he is on film, and his methodology derives from a bit of both. With only the vaguest idea of what his films will be about, he starts by choosing the actors he wants to collaborate with, works with each individually to develop their characters, and then introduces the characters to each other and monitors what happens.

That monitoring takes place in long, intensive workshop sessions that can last weeks or even months as the director and the actors jointly develop the script through as many drafts and false starts as it takes. It is Leigh, who has a faultless eye for the telling moment, who finally decides what stays in and what doesn’t, and once that decision is made, filming starts and no improvising is allowed. Instead of the more conventional “written and directed” line, Leigh’s on-screen credit used to read “devised and directed,” a more accurate description of how his process works.

This kind of work depends greatly on the actors, on their ability to dig as deep as they dare into their characters, on their willingness to push themselves further than most films are interested in or can even handle. Leigh asks his people to do a performer’s version of bungee jumping, to leap with heedless abandon into the unknown, with the confidence that the director will be there to pull them back from the abyss. With a hand as sure as Leigh’s, that safety is never really in doubt, and neither is his ability to pull off a kind of close-up magic, to show us all of humanity by concentrating so fiercely on one of its most particular segments.

To see so many of Leigh’s films in a short span of time is to see a process. His earlier films have less humor and more grimness, but, as Leigh apparently discovered that absurdity was more potent than agony for the points he wanted to make, they begin to go further and further in that direction. In chronological order, the films the AFI is showing are:

Bleak Moments (1971). Leigh’s first feature, and his only theatrical film until 1987’s “High Hopes,” this story of a woman who has to struggle with the care of mentally impaired sister was partially financed by actor Albert Finney, who puckishly suggested “Carry On Gloom” for a title. A contemporary review predicted it would “either make you laugh uproariously or you will want to shake each character by their ineffectual shoulders,” a response that Leigh would only make more intense over the years. Screening on Wednesday at 4:15 and 9:30 p.m.

Hard Labour (1973). One of the bleakest, most downbeat portraits of English working-class life you would ever hope to see, this film is rougher and more naturalistic than Leigh’s later work, though the heedless humor that would soon fully assert itself is visible in embryonic form. Look for Ben Kingsley (with a full head of hair) as Naseem, an Indian who runs a lethargic taxi service, and Alison Steadman as Veronica, a domestic tyrant of a daughter-in-law. Screening on Thursday at 4:15 and 9:30 p.m., preceded by a series of shorts, known as the “Five Minute Films,” Leigh directed in 1975.

Nuts in May (1975). Steadman again, in a complete change of pace from “Hard Labour,” in a comedy about a pair of inveterate urbanites who are determined to go back to nature on their vacation. Said to be the most popular of Leigh’s early TV films. Screening on Friday at 4:15 and 9:30 p.m.

The Kiss of Death (1976). Leigh’s whimsical, puckish sense of humor comes to full flower in this story of Trevor, the “dead quiet” undertaker’s assistant and his attempts at romance. Socially awkward enough to make Ernest Borgnine’s Marty look like a practiced seducer, Trevor’s shambling forays into the rituals of courtship have to be among the most humorously uncertain in the history of cinema. Screening on Saturday at 9:15 p.m.

Abigail’s Party (1977). A tour de force performance by Alison Steadman and very much of a departure for Leigh. Shot on video, not film, it is the stage-bound, one-set reproduction of an enormously successful play about a wildly unsuccessful middle-class dinner party, a theatrical venture that won two of England’s major acting awards for Steadman. Because it is on video, “Abigail’s Party” will screen at the AFI’s Goodson Screening Room on Tuesday at 9 p.m., preceded by a short film, “Permissive Society.”

Who’s Who (1978). One of Leigh’s few ventures into upper-middle class life, this look at the days and nights of a group of workers in a stock brokerage firm is a marvelously observed, devastating piece of work, an acid satire on pate-scarfing pretentious twits. Though Leigh’s usual unreserved sympathy for his characters is absent here, some of them, like the upper-class wanna-be Alan Dixon, are as unforgettable as any he and his actors ever created. Screening next Sunday at 6:45 p.m.

Grown-Ups (1980). A newly married couple move into their first home and have to put up not only with the wife’s unyieldingly ditzy sister but also with the fact that their next-door neighbor was their former teacher. One of Leigh’s best and most characteristic films, notable for its shifting sympathies and its deceptive melding of hilarity and pathos. Screening on Monday June 29 at 1:45 and 7 p.m.

Home Sweet Home (1981). The life and times of three not so jolly postmen, centering on Stan, a sullen ladies’ man deserted by his wife, who has placed his even more sullen daughter in an orphanage. Like all of Leigh’s work, funnier and sadder than any brief description can manage to convey, and noteworthy for its portrayal of two inept and thoughtless social workers who couldn’t help anyone out of a paper bag. Screening on Tuesday June 30 at 6:30 p.m.

Meantime (1983). Generally considered the best of Leigh’s TV films (though its humor is less in evidence) and called one of the great British films of the ‘80s by the Melbourne Film Festival, “Meantime” typically defies plot summation. It deals with two related families, one well-off and the other on the dole, and what happens when the former offers a job to a mentally feeble member of the latter. Starring Tim Roth in his debut as the luckless Colin, with exceptional supporting work by, among others, Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina and Phil Daniels. Screening on Wednesday July 1 at 1:45 and 7 p.m.

Four Days in July (1984). Leigh’s last film for the BBC before “High Hopes” returned him to theatrical features, this one focuses on two couples, one Catholic, the other Protestant, who turn out to have little in common except impending parenthood and the crucial fact of living in Northern Ireland. Screening on Thursday July 2 at 1:45 and 7 p.m.

Be there.