Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Wilmington made a memorable observation last year about Francis Ford Coppola’s re-edited version of Apocalypse Now. Wilmington wrote that the new edition was a better film overall because it was no longer a single man’s statement, but a collaboration between the older, wiser Coppola, who reconfigured the footage, and the younger, more restless Coppola, who shot it originally.

Despite the fact that Orson Welles never had an opportunity to revisit any of his butchered masterpieces (With the exception of Citizen Kane, all of his films were taken out of his hands in the editing room; the most infamous occurrence being with The Magnificent Ambersons.), his entire filmography seems to reflect the sort of collaboration that Wilmington described. Look at any of the six movies that the Oak Street is reviving this week, and you’ll find an agelessness unknown to most other films.

Welles, for all his technical daring commonly associated with the work of young filmmakers, also conveyed in his work a world-weariness that, fortunately, does not hit most until middle age. I’d like to focus on this latter trait because it seems too often overlooked in discussions of Welles’ career, yet I consider it no less vital to what makes a film distinctly Wellesian.

I recognize that it’s a quality easy to overlook (Even Welles’ biographer Peter Bogdanavich admitted to having to see Touch of Evil three times before he noticed the plot, let alone Welles’ emotional ties to it.). Like Stanley Kubrick, Welles surrounded his narratives with such awesome camera work that detractors to this day accuse the director of offering no substance. Yet the visceral joy of a Welles film always seems to float inches above great melancholy.

Consider the opening sequence of The Magnificent Ambersons (my favorite film of the six). In it, Welles’ romantic, evocative voice-over narration is matched by a series of shots which each reveal, in lush pictorial detail, an element of life of the film’s setting, the late 19th century Midwest. While the sequence is a triumph of the cinematic art—uniting feats of radio, literature, and photography under one medium—it curiously does not draw the audience into the action. Instead, Welles establishes that the time and place of the Amerbsons are clearly long gone. This is, for me, the most poignant form of nostalgia, since it makes the past seem ideally, almost naively, beautiful while suggesting that it can never be experienced again (A relevant side-note: The two films I know that best achieve this sensation were both directed by men who were not yet thirty—this, and Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim.).

Now consider that the meticulously composed tracking shots in The Stranger and Touch of Evil both end in murders. Or consider the eerie, netherworldly lighting of the aquarium-scene kiss between Welles and Rita Hayworth (already his ex-wife at the time) in The Lady From Shanghai. The list goes on and on.

One doesn’t even need a play-by-play analysis in order to figure out what really mattered to Welles. A brief summary of any of the six conveys quite clearly an obsession with failure and loss. Both Kane and Ambersons conclude that the grandeur of 20th century America came hand-in-hand with the death of imagination and independent spirit which helped define the nation’s character. The Lady From Shanghai only pretends to love a stranger so that she may manipulate him deviously, while Welles’ characters in Stranger and Evil lead prominent public lives which conceal past deceit and murder.

Mr. Arkadin (the one film on the line-up I haven’t seen) may be Welles’ most revealing expression of these themes. Dave Kehr describes the 1955 work as “a deliberate, bitter parody of Kane ... [marked by] a greatness harshly criticizing itself.” In other words, it’s the work of a filmmaker (only 41 years old when he directed it) who recognized that his own greatness had passed.

The last thing I hope to do with this article is portray Welles as some kind of gifted depressive; as I noted before, I only wanted to note an overlooked element of a legendary career. Above all else, the films of Orson Welles convey the sheer joy of filmmaking itself, a quality which explains why Sight and Sound magazine’s international poll of critics and filmmakers continues, decade after decade, to name him the greatest director of all time.

Welles was famously quoted with saying that a movie camera was the greatest train set you could ever give to a boy. What amazes me most about the films of this all-too-brief retrospective is that they never feel like the work of a man who was selfish with this gift. On the contrary, these films use the medium in order to express every conceivable feeling—from elation to melancholy, ambition to regret—so that a single viewing is never comprehensive. Welles’ is the cinema that keeps on giving.