New Hollywood styles in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

New Hollywood styles in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

Introduction

The Taxi Driver is a film that was directed by Martin Scorsese and was released in the year 1976. It lies in the category of neo-noir film, and it is also a psychological thriller. Paul Schrader scripted taxi Driver. The starring in the movie was Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Leonard Harris, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, and Harvey Keitel. The film was set in New York City, a city that was morally bankrupt following the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and it narrates a story of a lone taxi driver. In the movie, the taxi driver is full of insanity and wants to kill Harris, who is a presidential candidate and Shepherd, a lady he is possessed with and works for Harris. He also wants to assassinate Keitel, who is a pimp of a minor or underage prostitute by the name Foster who they end up becoming friends.

A commercial and critical success upon its release and the nomination for Academy Awards four times, Best Actor (who was De Niro), Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (which was for Foster), the film got Palme d’Or during Cannes Film Festival in the year 1976. However, the movie stirred up controversies due to the violent nature of the film and the use of a twelve-year-old who played the role of a prostitute. It is often cited by film directors, critics, and many audiences as the best movie of all time. In the year 2012, the Sight & Sound labeled it as the thirty-first most excellent movie ever in its tenfold critics’ poll and was ranked with the film The Godfather Part II. It was also ranked the 5^th best movie of all the time when it comes to the director’s poll. Moreover, it was considered historically, culturally, and aesthetically imperative by the United States Library of Congress. Furthermore, the film was chosen for conservation in the year 1994 by the National Film Registry. Martin Scorsese uses various cinematography techniques that classify the movie into the New Hollywood style.

Analysis

Much motivated by the New Wave in France plus other global film movements, most American directors in the 1960s and 1970s pursued to change Hollywood films in the same way. Holly Renaissance, New Hollywood, or New Wave in America changed traditional Hollywood practices and standards in numerous ways, forming a more artistic and innovative way of filming. Due to a significant decline in attendance to a movie theatre, popularity and advent of television, change of taste in film primarily among the youth, and an increase in production cost, Hollywood studios found themselves in financial disaster. Many studios in Hollywood hired younger people to boost the business, and they were given total control over every aspect of film making. Martin Scorsese became a very influential director in Hollywood during this era. Scorsese came up with a distinct and unique directorial style in his films that had reoccurring settings, themes, editing techniques, cinematography, and other components. The director had a couple of movies in Hollywood, but the movie that captured the New Hollywood aspects was the Taxi Driver of the year 1976. This film was a big departure from the traditional Hollywood and typified what the New Hollywood needed to gain in numerous ways. The exceptional aesthetics combined with the non-typical narrative of the movie, separated it from its conformist Hollywood predecessors.

New Hollywood highly favored disjunctive editing. In contrast to the conservative continuity editing in Hollywood, the latter distanced the predecessor’s films from New Hollywood and served numerous purposes, which included making the audience to be actively engaged in watching the film and disorienting the audience for ideological, psychological or artistic purposes, or the psychological purposes. One of the article writers about the film, Andre Caron, suggests that the director employs jump cuts (abrupt distancing process) to detach the audience from Travis. The most famous scenes in the film, Travis practices antagonizing a person in the mirror. In this scene, he points the gun at the mirror and says the infamous alteration, “You talking to me?” The director abruptly cuts on the gun cocking sounds and juxtaposes the scene with long cuts of the actor talking. From the talking, the scene is tailed by several dissolves of the actor looking at the wall and jump cut of the actor, Travis, spinning around twice, and all have a narration. The editing employed in the scene, combined with the narrative sound of the actor narration, all disorient and disturb the audience, besides mirroring delusions and paranoia that occurs in the actor’s head. In addition to bringing the audience closer to the actor’s mind, it makes his chain of thoughts appear more disturbing and violent. Taxi Driver employs innovative camerawork and editing techniques. Notably, the camerawork seems to match up with the pace of the film in every scene. The type of lighting that has been employed in the movie is low light. The scene where Travis drives around the city looking at prostitutes has a low key type of lighting. This lighting technique is used in neo-noir types of films to create a somber mood. Low key lighting has managed to capture the loneliness of the actor and many other factors in the movie. Moreover, low key lighting has also managed to create a fatality mood that has been exhibited in the entire film.

Long takes were highly employed in New Hollywood movies in contradiction to jump cut. In the 1960s, the normal shot length was between 8 to 10 seconds. In the movie Taxi Driver, when the main actor calls Betsy to offer an apology for their calamitous date and the attempt to come up with plans for her, it long took that took over ninety seconds. The scene starts with a standard shot of the actor on his phone, then the hallway, and it is in this hallway the camera remains all through Travis’ conversation, even though he is not on the screen. The actor comes on screen waling down this hallway and then out of the house, and throughout, the camera position does not change. This intervening moments and scene when the actor is not on screen are disorienting and strange.

The New Wave in France had low budget movies, and the New Hollywood film makes paid homage to their counterparts. These movies utilized some techniques out of the financial needs that brought originality and artistry to the films. One technique that was more prevalent throughout some of the movies was location shooting. The Taxi Driver employs location shooting all through New York City. Notably, the people who were found in the background of the scenes were mainly pedestrians instead of paying actors to do the same. Certain sound recorded in the movie were natural sounds from traffic, car horns, talking, and music. Scorsese masters the art of capturing reality in the film. The reality in the movie gives it gritty realism found in street life and exposes New York City through the actor’s eyes, seedy, dirty and immoral. Moreover, the city performs a crucial play in the movie. The more the actor explores the city via his taxi car, the mire Travis despises it together with its inhabitants. Travis longs to rid the city of scum and filth, and his mechanisms of doing grow more radical all through the movie. Taxi Driver’s mise-en-scene shows more than a city, crowded streets, a place of whole, and tough people. Scorsese utilizes the spacing, architecture, and some visual dynamics of New York city to elaborate on its core depths and reveal to the viewers Travis’s world, that can only be achieved through location shooting.

Looking past the artistic and cinematic aspects of the film, its overlying and narrative themes additionally contrast typical Hollywood and show the New Hollywood. For a start, the movie does not have a cohesive and typical plot. Films in this category have significantly departed from the mainstream film conventions. Most of the narrative in the Taxi Driver follows the main actor in his daily life and does not necessarily seem to take him anywhere specifically. Taxi Driver emphasizes more on the actor’s psychological state plus his increasing hatred instead of having a stable plot. The narrative fails to come up with clear motivation of the actor’s actions. Also, the film is jam-packed with interwoven stories, for instance, those of Iris and Betsy, and weird anecdotes, which include the taxi passenger who made Travis park at the same time explains to him his plots to killing his promiscuous wife. At the end of the film, it is when the real rising action starts, and the viewer can see the movie working forward to a climax.

Travis’s character exemplifies the unconventional storyline of the films. His actions create mixed feelings from the start of the film. The actor is shown as a morally ambiguous person, and this makes the viewer unsure of the way to look or feel about Travis. Complexity and moral ambiguity have greatly been used in New Hollywood movies, and they are the core virtues that make these films different from the normal melodramatic Hollywood tales based on simplistic oppositions on evil and good. Since the movie has been established from the main actor’s perception, including numerous perception narrations readings and shots, the viewer has to feel and sympathetically relate to Travis. But, as Travis’s behavior and thoughts become more violent and outrageous, the viewer begins to feel somewhat disconnected from the actor. Travis’s outburst that was directed to Betsy in the office plus his flopped assassination trial on Palantine reveal his deranged mental state and distance him further from the audience. Besides all of these events, his passion for assisting Iris reveals a more nurturing, caring side of the actor. However, the climatic and dramatic shooting scene where the actor kills men bends this sentiment. Travis assisted the young girl from the menace of prostitution, but he kills people violently and extremely to save the girl. Taxi Driver has many tensions scenes of sympathizing with the actor’s loneliness, but the audience is repelled by the anti-social and violent behavior of Travis. The films end by hailing Travis as a celebrity and a hero by a local newspaper. Furthermore, the end includes a thanksgiving letter from the father of Iris, who expressed gratitude for the actions that he did and allowing Iris to go home. Such an end complicates the character of Travis and makes him morally ambiguous.

One of the most often occurs in this category of movies is using a protagonist such as Travis. New Hollywood movies based on a core character who acts like an outsider, a loner, with questionable beliefs and values, and have a psychological issue, whether outrightly stated or implied in the film. This establishes a greater realism sense because, in real life, there is no distinct plot or theme, and people are not completely bad or good. Directors in this category of films came up with such kinds of movies, which were difficult to classify under different genres. This is no different for Taxi Driver as one cannot come up with a distinct classification of the film into one of the genres. In the classical approach to movies and narratives, there was a more distinct theme that would make it easier for viewers to classify the film into one of the genres. Traditionally, the protagonist was bad or good, but in the New Hollywood movie, as seen in the Taxi Driver, the protagonist’s character was hard to tell.

The New Hollywood movies like Taxi Drivers pushed the limits on what type of films would be seen. Due to its emergence, crime and violence in America films have drastically changed. There before, there was a code that prohibited sexual and violent scenes on screen, but after it was broken, New Hollywood directors incorporated their freedom, which featured obscenity, graphic sexuality, and violence, which is very common in most of the movies in the New Hollywood era. Taxi Driver revolves around the protagonist’s violent tendencies and thoughts, and all through the film, he utilizes vulgar language. Taxi Driver has a couple of violent scenes which end by Travis killing some three men. There is blood on the walls and the floors, and the actor gestures shooting himself with hands that had blood all over. This seen may seem less violent nowadays, but, in those days, it was a very violent scene, and the director had to come up with great ideas to make it as violent as possible. There is some sexuality in the Taxi Driver. The main actor visits a movie theatre that screened pornography, and he takes Betsy there on a date, and the director incorporates some scenes of people participating in intercourse from the pornographic movie. The sex theme has been included in the Taxi Driver because there are some prostitutes in the film. Iris, who was very young into prostitution, was incorporated in the movie, and this created a lot of controversies as it was never heard before in Hollywood.

Conclusion

The Taxi Driver was a movie that showed utmost rebellion towards the conservative Hollywood traditions and favored a unique, different, progressive, and artistic style of directing and shooting movies. When it comes to the narrative and cinematic approaches to the movie, it rebelled against its predecessors. The editing that was used in the film was different from what was seen from other films. Disjunctive editing ushered a new era of Hollywood film making. The use of natural sound also capitalized in the making of the moving. The director of the movie used the natural sound from the streets and incorporated them into the movie. Moreover, the movie also influenced the filming of other movies after that, and the new language in Hollywood films was created. Movies have drastically changed from that period onwards, and more cinematography is being included, thanks to the New Hollywood era, which was created by films like the Taxi Driver. The fil completely incorporated the modules of the New Hollywood era and aided define the impact on the new movement.