[Scorsese] does not create narratives that are easily assimilable. The formal structure of his work is never completely at the service of the viewer or of the story it is creating. There is an unashamed self-consciousness in his work and a sense of kinetic energy that sometimes threatens to overtake both viewer and story, but always provides a commentary upon the viewer's experience and prevents him or her from easily slipping into a series of narrative events. (pp. 207-08)

Scorsese is interested in the psychological manifestations of individuals who are representative either of a class or of a certain ideological grouping; he is concerned with their relationships to each other or to an antagonistic environment. Scorsese's films involve antagonism and struggle, and constant movement, even if that movement is within a tightly circumscribed area that has no exit…. [There] is no triumph for his characters. With the notable exception of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore all of his characters lose to their isolation or their antagonism…. [His] work shows a degree of stylization which eschews, for the most part, the sixties conventions of realism, defined primarily by location shooting and natural acting styles. In New York, New York he moves indoors entirely, depending on studio sets to achieve an expressive artificiality. But even in the preceding films, where locations are used, there is a sense that the place inhabited by the characters is structured by their perceptions and by the way we see and understand their perceptions. (p. 208)

[Scorsese's mise-en-scène] is never accommodating; his characters do not have homes that reflect comfort or security. The places they inhabit are places of transition, of momentary situation…. The Manhattan of Taxi Driver, the Little Italy of Mean Streets, even the Southwest of Alice are perfectly recognizable, almost too much so. The mise-en-scène of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver represent more than New York, a place of tough people, crowded streets, fights and whores. They represent, to borrow a notion of Roland Barthes', a New York-ness, a shared image of New York which has little to do with the city itself, but rather expresses what everyone, including many who live there, have decided New York should look like. At the same time … the New York of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver is reflective of the energy of the characters, in the former, and of the anomie of Travis Bickle, in the latter, and these qualities are communicated to us by means of the ways we are made to see the mise-en-scène. Our own perceptions and preconceptions merge with the filmmaker's within the narrative and are then filtered through a third point of view, that of the character or characters created by the narrative, resulting in a rather complex perspective.

The complexity is heightened by the fact that, up until New York, New York, and beginning again in The Last Waltz, Scorsese's films create a tension between two opposing cinematic forms: the documentary and the fictional. The documentary aspect offers the possibility of a seemingly objective observation of characters, places, and events; the other demands a subjectivity of point of view which in Scorsese's work is so severe that the world becomes expressionistic, a reflection of a particular state of mind. Scorsese is close to Godard in understanding the arbitrary nature of these conventions, and he freely mixes them. There is the sense in most of his work of capturing a "reality" of places and events that might exist even without his presence. Until Taxi Driver, he employs the hand-held camera and the rapid, oblique editing which have become associated with a "documentary" and improvisational style. His actors (particularly Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel) create their characters with an off-handedness and an immediacy that gives the impression of unpremeditated existence…. When these qualities are interwoven with the subjective impressions of the world communicated to us by the ways the characters see their environment and themselves, and when Scorsese modifies the location shooting we have come to take for granted in contemporary film with artificial sets and stylized lighting, a complex perceptual structure is created that demands careful examination.

Scorsese started his commercial career with a film strongly influenced by the New Wave. Who's That Knocking at My Door?—a finger exercise for Mean Streets—is inscribed in the hand-held, jumpcut, non-transitional style that many filmmakers took from the surface of the French films of the early sixties. Its mise-en-scène is partly neo-realist, partly documentary, mixed with the subjectivity of perception and allusiveness that marks [Godard's] Breathless and [Truffaut's] The Four Hundred Blows. Who's That Knocking? is an "experimental" film in all senses: formally, it begins trying out the camera strategies, the restless, foreboding movement, that will become one of Scorsese's major formal devices. Contextually, it prepares the way for Mean Streets, J. R. … being an early version of Charlie in the later film—more of an oppressed Catholic than his later incarnation, less rooted in his environment, standing over and against New York rather than being enclosed within it as Charlie is. (pp. 209-11)

Boxcar Bertha, a film totally different from Who's That Knocking? and Mean Streets, still sets itself up as a link between them, if only by smoothing out the stylistic quirks apparent in the former and preparing for the consistent and assured approach of the latter. A violent film, situated in the seventies, late—Bonnie and Clyde mode of period evocation, it is a short, direct narrative which does little more than prepare for an enormous shoot-out at the end…. What Scorsese adds to the film is a further indication of his talent with the moving camera…. Boxcar Bertha is an important work not so much by Scorsese as for him; it permits him to work within the basic patterns of early-seventies film, its violence and its urgency, and to understand how those patterns can be worked together with the looser, more self-conscious and subjective elements of Who's That Knocking?

The integration occurs in Mean Streets, a film which can be seen as a "documentary" in the form of a carefully structured narrative fiction of four young men growing up on the fringes of society in New York's Little Italy, or as a subjective fiction of incomplete lives and sporadic violence in the form of a documentary of four young men in New York's Little Italy…. Scorsese investigates the almost incoherent street ramblings of disenfranchised men whose lives are defined by disorder, threatened by their own impulses, and, though confined by narrow geographical boundaries, paradoxically liberated by the turmoil of the bars, tenements, and streets that make up their confines. (pp. 211-13)

[None] of the characters in the film, with the possible exception of Tony, the barkeeper, has the center or sense of direction that we have come to expect from characters in conventional film fictions, and it is the purpose of the film to observe them in their randomness and as part of an unpredictable flow of events. When we see Charlie on the streets, no matter how central he may be to the narrative moment, he is composed in the frame as one figure among many, standing off-center, next to a building, other people moving by him…. Little violences, sporadic shootings, and fistfights punctuate the film as if they were parts of ongoing events, or as if they were moving toward some greater violence, which in fact they do. The end of the film is an explosion of gunfire and blood. (pp. 213-14)

It is difficult to accept or to understand a film that does not have emotional turmoil as its subject but merely as a referent, and chooses instead to make its own action its subject. Mean Streets is not about what motivates Charlie and Johnny Boy, not about what they think and feel (although these are present), but about how they see, how Charlie perceives his world and Johnny Boy reacts to it. In none of his films will Scorsese opt for the psychological realism of explained actions, defined motivations, or identifiable characters…. The world they inhabit is violent in the extreme, but it is a violence that is created by the characters' very attempts to make peace with it. From the point of view of the characters in Mean Streets, their world is perfectly ordinary, and Scorsese reflects this through the documentary nature of many of the images. But at the same time, we perceive a heightened sense of reality, a stylized, expressive presence most evident in the bar sequences, in the restless, moving camera, in the fragmentary, off-center editing.

Vitality and tension are apparent not only in the images, but in the dialogue … as well. Everyone in Mean Streets is a compulsive talker …, using words as an extension of themselves, a sign of their vitality. Their language is rooted in New York working-class usage, profoundly obscene and charged with movement. (pp. 217-18)

Scorsese, his co-writer [Mardik Martin], and his actors take the forms of the everyday language of a particular ethnic group, concentrate it and make it artificial, the artificiality creating the effect of the overheard and the immediate. The language of Mean Streets becomes a means of self- and group-definition, speaking of an unrooted life yet at the same time attempting to root that life in a community of shared rhythms and expressions. (p. 221)

Mean Streets does not, finally, define itself as any one thing. Although it depicts the activities of a group of disenfranchised urban ethnics, it does not attempt to comment on a social and economic class. A film about volatile emotions, it seems uninterested in analyzing emotions or baring souls. Although it deals with gangsters, it does not reflect upon or examine the generic tensions of the gangster film…. What it does reflect is Scorsese's (and hopefully our) delight in the film's capacity to capture a moment of communication, of interaction, and out of a series of such moments to fashion a sense of place and movement, energy and violence. It reflects Scorsese's growing control of point of view, his ability to shift from objective to subjective observation, often intermingling the two, until, in Taxi Driver, it is difficult to tell them apart. (pp. 221-22)

Taxi Driver is the inverted extension of Mean Streets. Where that film examines a small, isolated urban sub-community, Taxi Driver focuses on one isolated urban sub-individual. Where Mean Streets presents its characters in tenuous control of their environment, at home in their surroundings, Taxi Driver presents its character trapped by it, swallowed and imprisoned. More accurately, the objective-subjective points of view of Mean Streets that allow us to look both at and with the characters is replaced by a subjective point of view that forces us continually to see as the character sees, creating a mise-en-scène that expresses, above all, the obsessive vision of a madman. Finally, where Mean Streets celebrates urban life in its violence and its community …, Taxi Driver rigorously structures a path to violence that is separate from community, separate from the exigencies of any "normal" life, separate from any rational comprehension, but only the explosion of an individual attempting to escape from a self-made prison, an individual who, in his madness, attempts to act the role of a movie hero.

One further connection exists between the two films. Mean Streets is a diffuse film noir. Its dark, enclosed, violent urban world recalls many of the noir conventions. But, despite its violent end, it escapes the total bleakness of noir precisely because of its sense of community. Even though its characters are trapped, they do not evidence the loneliness, dread, and anxiety manifested in film noir. Again, despite the cruelty that ends the film, the bulk of it emphasizes a friendship—albeit unstable—among its characters. Taxi Driver, however, renders the conventions of film noir in an immediate, frightening manner. Its central character lives completely enclosed in a city of dreadful night; he is so removed and alone that everything he sees becomes a reflection of his own distorted perceptions. Travis Bickle … is the last noir man in the ultimate noir world: closed and dark, a paranoid universe of perversion, obsession, and violence. In the creation of this world, Scorsese goes to the roots of film noir, to certain tenets of German Expressionism that call for "a selective and creative distortion" of the world by means of which the creator of a work can represent "the complexity of the psyche" through a visual style that exposes the "object's internal life, the expression of its 'soul.'" Scorsese does want to "expose" the inner life of his character, but not to explain it. The internal life of Travis Bickle remains an enigma throughout the film. It cannot be explained, even through the most dreadful violence, and a major concern of the film is to frustrate our attempts at understanding that mind. But Scorsese is very interested in communicating to us the way a world looks as it is perceived by such a mind, and he uses "a selective and creative distortion" of perception in extraordinary ways. (pp. 223-24)

Taxi Driver is aware of its own formal identity…. The film defines its central character not in terms of social problems nor by any a priori ideas of noble suffering and transcendent madness, but by the ways we see the character and the way he sees himself and his surroundings. He is the climactic noir figure, much more isolated and very much madder than his forebears. No cause is given for him, no understanding allowed; he stands formed by his own loneliness and trapped by his own isolation, his actions and reactions explicable only through those actions and reactions. (p. 227)

[There is] no analysis of, nor reasons given for, his behavior—none, at least, that make a great deal of rational sense. He can, perhaps, be viewed as a radically alienated urban castoff, a mutant produced by the incalculable dehumanization of our postindustrial society…. But the film withholds any political, social, or even psychological analysis…. However, after saying this, I must point out that the film does not neglect an analysis of the cultural aberrations that afflict Travis, and our-selves. Scorsese quietly, even hilariously, suggests one possible motivation for, or result of, Travis's psychosis. The more deeply he withdraws, the more he comes to believe in the American movie myths of purity and heroism, love and selflessness, and to actuate them as the grotesque parodies of human behavior they are. Travis Bickle is the legitimate child of John Wayne and Norman Bates: pure, self-righteous, violent ego and grinning, homicidal lunatic; each the obverse of the other; each equally dangerous. Together they create a persona so out of touch with ordinary human experience that the world he inhabits and perceives becomes an expressionist noir nightmare: an airless and dark trap that its inhabitant escapes only by drawing everything into it with him. The final irony occurs when Travis's act of slaughter, which he believes is an act of liberation and purification, is taken as such by everyone else, and we discover that we have been trapped by the same aberrations as he, that the double perspective we are offered by the film fuses, and we momentarily accept the lunatic as hero. (pp. 235-36)

[Consideration of] Travis's killing of the robber in the delicatessen and the manic preparations and rituals he puts himself through, should make the [violence at the end of the film] less surprising and perhaps less gratuitous than it first appears. Unfortunately, no matter how much is revealed by such analysis, it remains an excrescence, a moment of grotesque excess in an otherwise controlled work. It damages the film, permitting it to be rejected as only one more entry in the list of violent exploitations rampant in the mid-seventies. But even so damaged, the film is less cynical than many of its relatives, and no matter how much it may pander to the lowest expectations of an audience, it also holds back, tricks those expectations, and, save for those few minutes in which control is lost, remains a coherent, subtle work. (p. 245)

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, which precedes Taxi Driver, is a film so completely its opposite that it might be by another hand. And although it has great formal energy, it is more important for its subject than its execution.

Alice is a film of light, concerned with realizing personal energies and impressing those energies onto the world in a non-destructive way. It is one of the rare films of the late sixties and early seventies that offers a notion of optimism, "a small step forward," as Diane Jacobs says [in her Hollywood Renaissance], out of the hatred and murder, passivity and manipulation that have informed most of our recent films. But it remains only a step, and we seem more likely to retreat from it—as does Scorsese—than to follow it through. In the context of Scorsese's work, Alice stands apart, almost as a dialectic to the dark violence of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, almost offering the possibility that the violence can be contained and subdued. The violent character of … Ben is seen in the film partially as an intrusion, partially as a mode of behavior that exists and must be attended to. It is not allowed, as is similar behavior in the other films, to encompass and diminish everything else. But it does exist, and there is a sense of brooding and nervousness in the camera movements throughout the film that seems to portend something other than what these movements are covering and that relates the film to the essential concerns of Scorsese's other works: threat always exists; energies are always ready to be expended. Here the threats are overcome and the energies directed joyfully. (p. 251)

It is rare that a film, particularly when it takes the form of a journey, a road movie, leaves both us and its characters alone, without indicating momentous events and major change. Except for the event that sets Alice out (which is underplayed) and the violence of Ben (which Scorsese cannot avoid), Alice is content to observe possibilities of change and freedom, however limited, without forcing its characters to pay a price. No one dies (with the exception of Alice's husband), no one gets emotionally or physically hurt or scarred…. Coming, as it does, between Mean Streets, in which the community is dark and volatile, finally destructive, and Taxi Driver, where there is no community and the isolated man explodes into madness, Alice indicates that the dialectic is not dead and that American film could, conceivably, survive with its characters talking to each other, listening, and responding. It stands, with all its flaws, as an important entry into that recent group of American films that attempts to come to terms with women in a way other than the conventional modes of melodrama. (pp. 259-60)

New York, New York contains no location shots. With the help of production designer Boris Leven and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, Scorsese builds an artificial world. The result is odd, and I am not certain that what we perceive is what was intended. The opening titles of the film, the painted city skyline, immediately refer us to a pastel evocation of the forties and early-fifties studio musical. But as the film proceeds, this intended evocation begins to disappear and be replaced by a consciousness of the methods of evocation. The forties interiors and the strange, almost abstract suggestiveness of the exteriors develop their own attraction; the control of the mise-en-scène seems to become more important than why that control is being exercised, so that form threatens to refer only to itself. The viewer becomes aware not of why the studio sets are there (to evoke the atmosphere of the studio musical), only that they are there. Not that they are not fascinating in themselves…. But they are only fascinating as aspects of design. And they are inconsistent. Most of the interiors, with the exception of an oddly lit motel room and a nightclub lit entirely in red neon, are conventionally "real." They look like interiors evocative of the forties, whereas the exteriors evoke not a time but the idea of studio sets.

Scorsese has confused two levels of realism: illusionary realism, in which the cinematic space and its articulations create the illusion of a "real world," and a realism of form, in which the cinematic space points to its own existence, prevents the viewer from passing through the form into an illusion of reality, and uses that obstacle to create other levels of awareness…. If Scorsese was consciously attempting to correct the phenomenon of "evocation" films that followed upon [Arthur Penn's] Bonnie and Clyde in the late sixties and early seventies by demonstrating that the evocation of the past in film is only the evocation of the ways film evokes the past, the inconsistency of exterior artificiality and interior "realism" compromises his attempt.

There is also an extraordinary mixture of genres in the film. It is primarily a romantic musical in the post-Cabaret style, in which the musical numbers occur as part of the narrative, as an actual stage performance—or, in one sequence, a film performance—rather than expanding out of the narrative and into another spatial plane…. But here again Scorsese denies the tradition he apparently wants to celebrate, mixing a reflexivity that forces us to view the film as a self-conscious recreation not of a period but of a film of a period with a realism of quite recent origin. A film like Bob Fosse's Cabaret … attempts to turn the musical into a "realistic" genre, a melodrama with music. New York, New York continues that attempt, but at the same time undoes it by attempting to evoke older musicals that had no pretense to that kind of realism and flaunting the unreality of its appearance. If that were not complicated enough, exteriors are so lit and photographed as to appear similar to the mise-en-scène of Taxi Driver, so that a claustrophobic, barren, and occasionally foreboding effect is achieved that saturates the film with the aura of film noir. This in itself is not novel…. But it is not clear what the darkness of New York, New York is reflecting, since the temporal overlays are so uncertain. The occasional despair about "putting on the show" or about personal and financial security that manifested itself in some thirties musicals grew out of the Depression, the time in which the films were made and the time they reflected. New York, New York made in the seventies, is about the forties, and it is difficult to determine whether the noir elements of the film are merely part of the evocation of the forties noir style, an experiment in genre-mixing, or an attempt to create a setting for a romance that has its dark and anxiety-ridden moments. (pp. 261-63)

In his approach to the inarticulateness of the characters and to the somberness of their situation and surroundings, Scorsese avoids some of the glibness (but also the brightness) of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and replaces its nervous energy with a slow, sometimes ponderous rhythm of emotional liberation emerging with considerable pain and uncertainty. But like Alice, this film does its best to avoid the melodrama and sentiment inherent in its subject, denying the emotional glut that might easily have been built up. Those sequences in which Francine begins to move on her own and in which Jimmy's separation from her is made complete are among the best indicators of Scorsese's control over the narrative movement. (p. 265)

It is difficult for American film to create a narrative that speaks to the immediate realities of people who do not and never will experience overwhelming insights and emotions, and to speak to these realities in a form that makes us understand them in a full social and political context. Cinema can do it: the films of Godard and Rohmer, of Alain Tanner and Rainer Werner Fassbinder prove that the cinematic imagination is more than able to work within valid emotional limits and a clear understanding of how people function in a world without heroism and emotional sacrifice. This is, of course, not within the American film tradition, and we must be content to observe and comment upon those films that at least question the tradition and offer other possibilities. Scorsese is rather unique among recent filmmakers in his ability to cover a full range of narrative possibilities, imitating, questioning, mocking them, sometimes all at the same time. If New York, New York fails to cohere because it attempts to do too much, its failure points to an ever greater success: the success of an active imagination, constantly probing and questioning, demanding that the forms of its art reveal and account for themselves. (pp. 268-69)

Robert Phillip Kolker, "Expressions of the Streets: Martin Scorsese," in his A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman (copyright © 1980 by Oxford University Press, Inc.; reprinted by permission), Oxford University Press, New York, 1980, pp. 206-69.