This weekend, the Oak Street Cinema continues its Martin Scorsese retrospective with two crime dramas, Mean Streets (1973) and GoodFellas (1990). Along with Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (which opened the series last weekend) these are some of the most frequently canonized works in contemporary American movies. They are among the only contemporary titles to share space in popular culture alongside the likes of Citizen Kane and Psycho. The weight attached to classic films often makes fresh viewing seem daunting and repeats borderline irrelevant––a particuarly curious status in this case since the works feel so pre-viewed through the singular point of view of their maker.

Still, when I first watched Scorsese’s films in early adolescence, it was partly out of a sense of obligation to see the movies I felt I was supposed to be seeing. He was, along with Kubrick and Tarantino, one of the first directors my friends and I learned to identify from film to film. I realize now, though, that what attracted us most was the extreme violence, flip irony and mannered repetitions of the word fuck offered under the seductive header of a grown-up cinema. The stylistic innovations and autobiographical intentions reached us as though subliminally.

In recent years, I’ve come to understand Scorsese as a scholar as well as a storyteller. His involvement in film restoration and his introductions of underlooked classics has revealed his filmmaking impulses to be as much the result of lifelong study as they are physical instinct (“I would love to be able to move a camera as quickly as I move my head,” he was once quoted as saying).

One reason why I find myself particularly drawn to Scorsese’s films now is because their ongoing desire to reconcile these impulses––academic on the one hand, visceral and entertainment-worthy on the other––mirrors my own developing attitudes toward the medium. If nothing else, Scorsese’s work encourages viewers to keep engaging with movies and thinking about how movies engage with us.

That said, a few observations I’ve had while attending the first three films of the Oak Street retrospective:

1. Movie references in Scorsese’s work are as densely packed as those in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, who alludes to other movies more frequently than any other great director I know. Godard, however, often uses references to advertise movies he likes or to call attention to something in a movie that most people haven’t considered, sort of a dramatized film criticism. But when Robert De Niro pours alcohol over his bread in Taxi Driver while a droning off-screen narration explains his daily life, the only thing one discovers about Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest is that it meant enough to Scorsese for him to see elements of that film (set in rural France in the early 20th century) in contemporary New York City.

The director’s cinephilia appears in his work as consistently and obsessively as his parents and friends. Another way of putting it is that movies are in Scorsese’s blood, and blood always runs in Scorsese films.

2. The violence in Scorsese’s work, whether literal or implied (as in After Hours or The Age of Innocence), is inherent in the director’s style. Like the work of one of his heroes, Samuel Fuller, style seems to be a weapon for Scorsese, a martial art. It is blunt, attuned to brutality, and commands one’s attention. The unexpected switches from objective shots to seemingly subjective ones––often represented by suddenly slowing down or speeding up frame rates––are just one example.

A possible explanation for why Scorsese’s two comedies, After Hours and The King of Comedy , are some of the most terrifying works in that genre is that they utilize the director’s brutality to convey repressed emotion, disappointment. This ends up saying something new about comedy and the feelings the genre manipulates.

3. As in the protracted fist-fights that appear in Fuller films such as Park Row and Pickup on South Street, Scorsese’s realized violence is as explicit, imaginative and graceless as real life yet romanticized through smooth tracking shots, punchy editing and vivid attention to detail. What emerges more than anything is an ambivalence towards the subject.

The banal, often funny dialogue of Scorsese’s most violent movies suggests the interludes between violence. Every time I watch Jake LaMotta (De Niro) browbeat his first wife from a kitchen table in Raging Bull, I can’t help but imagine what my grandfather must have been like as a younger man, when he bullied and hit my father.

4. Seeing Taxi Driver again after a few years, I was surprised to remember that there was no rock-n-roll on the soundtrack. While I may have been confusing the movie with Mean Streets, which has tons of pop music in it, there is a strong musical element running through all of Scorsese’s work. It is not a huge surprise, then, to see how often Scorsese discusses the work of Vincente Minnelli (Meet Me in St. Louis) in his great documentary, A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (maybe the ultimate reconciliation of his two impulses, it explicitly portrays movie watching and study as a personal, life-sustaining act).

Other similarities between Scorsese movies and rock-n-roll albums: The layered audio tracks–– which design an aural world as precise as the sets––and the direct accessibility of the emotions.