TAXI DRIVER

In class we've been told to see a film and to do an analysis of it. I've seen Taxi Driver which is a 1976 American psychological thriller film. It was  directed by Martin Scorsese,  written by Paul Schrader and performed by  Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks and Leonard Harris. It was set in a decaying New York City .
In this film, Travis Bicklea, a Vietnam veteran; finds that his life has been changed after returning America from the battle-field. He suffers from insomnia which leads him to take a job as a taxi-driver. He works at night and many of his consumers are prostitutes, adulterous people...While he is drivind the taxi becomes infatuated with Betsy, a campaign volunteer for Senator and presidential candidate Charles Palantine. So, he enters to volunter. As the film continues, Travis is disgusted by the sleaze, dysfunction, and prostitution that he witnesses throughout the city. After some disliking events that he witnesses, he tries to stop all the problems killing Palantine but he doesn't succeed. At that night, he goes to a strip club and kills some people but he is severely injured. Finally, he recovers and starts again working as a taxi driver. 


The main character is Travis Bickle and some of the characters that have importance in the film are: Betsy(the girl that Bickle likes), Palantine( the Senator and who Bickle try to kill) and Iris( a young prostitute).

My favourite scene is when Bickle saves a man's life from a robbery and then, the owner takes responsibility for the deed, taking Travis' handgun. I think that the things that Biclkes sees at night motivated him to do this action(killing the robber). After this, Travis Bickle starts to become more crazy and to kill more people. 

In Taxi Driver, Scorsese manages his camera angles and editing to give importance to  Travis seeing the world through glass or mirrors, especially the mirror of the taxi, through which all major characters enter Taxi Driver: Betsy through the panes of an all glass office; Palantine through his rear-view mirror; and Iris and Sport in a fleeting glance in his mirror. As Travis meets with a black-market gun dealer, and in this scene the weapon literally becomes the organ of perception. Scorsese situates his camera on Travis' arm as that arm takes the weapon and slowly pans it across the window looking down on the street below. But, I think that the film was so slow. The music is quite well because it engages you and ut suits with all the scenes.

With this film, I learnt how people return from war, specially from Vietnam, and all the problems that are in big cities, in this case in NY. I think that Scorsese tries to critisice all this problems and that's OK because he does constructive criticism. This film is given in the list because it shows the consecuences of one of the biggest issues in the 20th century, the Vietnam War.