LONDON, England (CNN) -- Social networking, Martin Scorsese and cinema classics on demand: this is the enticing mix on offer at new movie Web site The Auteurs.





The Auteurs mastermind Efe Cakarel (center) at Cannes with Celluloid Dreams' Hengameh Panahi (left) and Martin Scorsese.





The self-styled "online cinematheque" allows users to watch art house films from directors like Michael Winterbottom, Francois Ozon and Walter Salles, while Facebook-style profile pages and discussion forums encourage movie debate.





With their innovative approach, The Auteurs hope to introduce art house cinema to a whole new audience.





Recently, The Auteurs announced a prestigious partnership with another more widely known auteur: Scorsese.





The site is collaborating with Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation (WCF) -- an organization dedicated to restoring lost cinema classics from around the world -- to exhibit the refurbished masterpieces online.





The first four rescued works from Scorsese's project are currently available to watch for free on The Auteurs Web site.





Among them are Korean domestic thriller "The Housemaid" (1960) and "Transes" (1973), a documentary about pioneering Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwan, famously described by Scorsese as "the Rolling Stones of North Africa." Watch a clip from "The Housemaid" Watch a clip from "Transes"





"It is really exciting and important to have Scorsese preserving the films he is preserving," said one of the masterminds behind The Auteurs, Eduardo Costantini, over the phone from New York.





"As he said, it's not only important to preserve, but to show -- and he chose The Auteurs because of our look and feel and our philosophy and concept. We are really proud."





The basic ambition behind The Auteurs is to make high quality cinema accessible to a young, global audience by making it available on demand cheaply.





"If you are not in LA, London, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, or Berlin, forget it," Efe Cakarel told CNN over the phone from Palo Alto, California.





"Many of these films you cannot get even on DVD if you are living in Warsaw, in Istanbul, in Seoul or Buenos Aires."





The Auteurs is Cakarel's brainchild: an ambitious former Goldman Sachs banker with a head for technology, he came up with the idea back in 2007 in Tokyo when, with some spare time on his hands, he tried to watch Wong Kar-wai's "In the Mood for Love" on the Internet.





"It was very simple. I went online and I did not find a place that I could use," he says. He started writing his business plan there and then.





Cakarel says he knew that if he was going to succeed in his quest to bring quality cinema to the global village he would have to enlist some of the industry's top brass.





Enter Argentine millionaire, Eduardo Costantini of Costa Films, the company behind 2007 Berlinale winner "Elite Troop," and Hengameh Panahi of Paris-based distributor Celluloid Dreams which represents films like Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet," which won the Grand Prize at Cannes Film Festival this year.





Costantini and Panahi have instilled the site with their film knowledge, and paved the way for the site's other major collaboration with masters of the vintage re-release, the Criterion Collection.





Each month, the Criterion Collection curates a free online film festival making available classic films from its large library on The Auteurs. This month, users can watch Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 classic "L'Avventura" or "Harakiri" (1962) by Japanese master Masaki Kobayashi.





Of course, all this begs the question: is there really a big appetite for auteur-driven feature films outside the lofty but limited cinephile circles -- especially at a time when studio-driven blockbuster fodder like "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and "Angels & Demons" dominate at the box office?





"I want to create an entirely new audience for these films," says Cakarel. "Because the only thing people in much of the
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