Auteur Approach To Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver Essays Examples

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Taxi Driver (1976) is a movie written by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorsese. This essay analyzes the movie Taxi Driver (1976). It examines the contributions of Martin Scorsese as a filmmaker and Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, the protagonist. The analysis looks at the Auteur approach of Martin Scorsese and analyzes how the movie highlights Robert De Niro, the actor. It generally discusses what the approaches are and applies them to the movie while analyzing.

Plot

The movie stars Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a taxi driver, an ex-marine and Vietnam War veteran. Travis is an insomniac, hence watches porn movies, and rides buses and subways to pass the time. He becomes a taxi driver so he can earn to stay awake. He goes anywhere and anytime and sometimes drives seventy-two hours a week to escape loneliness and insomnia. He sees that New York had deteriorated into a cesspool. He becomes obsessed with Betsy, a political campaigner for presidential nominee Senator Charles Palantine. She rejects him when he takes her to a porn movie for a date. Travis plans to assassinate Palantine so he buys guns, but the assassination attempt does not succeed. Another major character in the movie is Iris, a prostitute, and runaway twelve-year-old girl, played by Jodi Foster. Travis thinks that he needs to rescue Iris from the clutches of the pimp and lover Mathew.

Auteur Theory

Auteur theory recognizes that, in certain circumstances, a director of the movie is its auteur or author. Andrew Sarris says, “The strong director imposes his own personality on a film; the weak director allows the personalities of others to run rampant”. The term “auteur” dates back to 1920s in the French film critics writing’s but it was coined as far back 1913 by German’s as “author’s film” or “Autoren film”. It was an attempt by the German filmmakers to reach the middle class audience as the Cinema until then was for the high-class audience. Some writers started campaigning for the rights to the film as authors for the so-called Autoren films and not just the script. In France, the concept of auteur came from the other direction with the filmmaker or director being the author irrespective of who wrote the script. Until then the films were scenario-led or script-led films with the studios commissioning some scenarios from writers and getting them directed by studio-appointed directors.
The 1954 essay ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma’ by François Truffaut in Cahiers du cinéma launched the debate fresh. The group of critics at the Cahiers did not follow the concept of the early 1920s, in fact, they totally dismissed. They tied the concept of auteur with mise-en-scene, especially taking into consideration the American films and directors. Though American directors had little or no control over the production process except for the actual filming of the shots, this did not mean that they could not attain auteur status. Style could also differentiate an auteur. Cahiers group promoted the term auteur so it could now refer to a director’s discernible style or to filmmaking techniques where the director’s impact was as noticeable on the script or scenario as it was on the film itself. Examples of author as auteurs are Orson Welles and David Lynch in the United States. In the US, Andrew Sarris, a film critic, brought this word to the mainstream.
Martin Scorsese’s trademark filmmaking is evident in the film Taxi Driver. He had explored the psychological perspectives of all his characters in the movies. In fact, except for a couple of scenes, the movie is Travis’s perspective. Travis writes a dairy, like all obsessive people, though his handwriting a mixture of capital and small letters, which again tries to point to a troubled psyche as well as his lack of education. Travis is a Vietnam War veteran and he suffers from the vagaries of war resulting in insomnia possibly being used to constantly staying awake to stay alive. He keeps looking in the rear view mirror due which is due to his habit of watching his back during the time he spent in the war. He is isolated and feels lonely but wants to the society to accept him. He sees the degeneration of New York and feels that Betsy and Iris are victims of this and need rescuing, though they never express that desire to him. He decides for them that they need rescuing and hence the assassination attempts on the senator Palantine and Matthew. Travis feels that New York is a sewer and filled with scum and one day rain will fall and wash away the scum.
Scorsese’s protagonists in all his films have psychological issues. Travis thinks he is a CIA agent. He trains to be one by doing pull-ups and push-ups. He writes to his parents “the sensitive nature of my work for the government demands utmost secrecy”. Scorsese uses his long shots, jump cuts, slow motion shots and God shot or priest-shot or overhead shot. Scorsese uses long tracking shots instead of a master shot in Taxi Driver. He speeds up and slows down the final slaughter scene to let us journey through the mind of Travis, to capture the different speeds of his mind. The subtext of the movie is that Travis returns from Vietnam to find that he has returned to a horrible world and his job is not yet finished. A few shots where Travis talks to his passengers in his rear-view mirror show that Travis has a bounded view of the world and makes judgments. He feels he is God’s lonely man. Scorsese had taken over a condemned building to create the Travis’s room and the last shot, cut a hole in the ceiling to get the overhead shot at the end. The Iris’s story happens after Betsy’s story in Paul Schrader’s script and Scorsese shot the film that way with Travis having a haircut after Betsy’s incident . Scorsese lets the viewer jump from one scene with long hair to another with short hair and back so, the viewer realizes the similarities between the stories. It was a technique used to bring about a comparison.

Conclusion

“New York, New York (1977), Taxi Driver (1976), and Mean Streets (1973) The three films demonstrate how, at its best, Scorsese's work affords a heightened fusion of style, narrative, and subject matter through which the films' significant concerns are represented and worked through with a rare, almost confrontational, emotional and intellectual intensity. While these qualities are apparent to a lesser or less intensive extent in the other films analyzed, all bear witness to the significance of context to their making and meanings”.
There was a time when Martin Scorsese was considered the greatest living director. Taxi Driver is one of his best movies and certainly the most critiqued movie.

References

Autoren films in German Cinema. (2012, September 24). Retrieved from sjfilmhistory: https://sjfilmhistory.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/autorenfilms-in-german-cinema/
Grist, L. (1996). Authorship and Context: The Films of Martin Scorsese (1963 - 1977). Warwick: Department of Film & Television Studies, University of Warwick.
Introduction to Auteur Theory. (2010, November 16). Retrieved from Film and Media Studies at St Gregorys: http://filmandmedialevel3.blogspot.in/2010/11/introduction-to-auteur-theory.html
Taxi Driver (1976). (2015, April 22). Retrieved from IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075314/
The Auteur Theory: Intentional and Unintentional. (2009, November 16). Retrieved from The Cinephile Fix: https://cinephilefix.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/hello-world/
The Last Temptation of Travis Bickle. (1997, September). Retrieved from Off Screen: http://offscreen.com/view/taxi_driver