Cinematography contains many different intentions, much of them going far beyond the direct action of photographing the action. Many of the methods used are all about adding visual subtext and visual metaphor to a scene. The ways in which the cinematographer uses movement, composition, color, and light can be powerful tools to enhance the dramatic elements of the story. Martin Scorsese’s 'Taxi Driver' (1976) is an example of skillful and deliberate use of cinematography to engage the audience and provide another dimension to understand the story. The audience comes to know a great deal of information about the main character, his motivations, and his circumstances, all of which are fundamental to the story and communicated entirely through visual means.
The opening title sequence of 'Taxi Driver' (1976) achieves much more than just presenting the film’s title, key production, and cast members. Photographed by Michael Chapman, the film’s opening title sequence gives the audience a great deal of information that tells them where they are and what kind of place it is. From the opening shot of a cab slowly emerging from clouds of steam vapors, cut to the POV shots of the slick neon-lit streets, pimps, hustlers, and outcasts through a rainy taxicab windshield, Chapman uses the night view of New York as an allegory for a hellish nightmare of moral rot and urban decay. The lighting and color choices produce a guttural, emotional response in the audience. Chapman’s use of neon reds and blues emphasizes the concept of dark eroticism and the ever-present danger and paranoia that inhabits the city of filth and scum. These visual tools add additional layers of meaning to the content of the story.
The extreme close-up of the story’s protagonist, Travis Bickle, with glaring red, white, and blue neon lights reflected on his face, not only shows his intent gaze but also manages to convey his inner state of mind. By framing the eyes and then cutting to what the character sees, Chapman invites the audience to inhabit Bickle’s brain and experience the world as he is experiencing it. Without using a single word, Chapman takes the audience inside Bickle’s point-of-view and the distinct way in which he sees the city and how it disgusts him. Chapman uses the opening title sequence of the film to communicate a foreshadowing of the mood and the future tone of the film as an underworld of alienation, aloneness, anger, and violence as if darkness threatens to close in over them.
As Bickle leaves the cab company after applying for a job, the camera slowly pans across the interior of his dismal studio apartment. The high angle looking down on the Bickle reveals the overall layout of the single room and the scope of his lifestyle in one continuous shot. The audience dominates the subject as Bickle is reduced in stature as well as substance. The framing shows newspapers scattered across his lowly cot, protective bars across his window, and Bickle has just finished a meal consisting of a Coke and a McDonald’s hamburger. Chapman uses this high-angle objective camera view and framing to reveal Bickle’s one-dimensional life that he constructs out of fear and hatred, wholly alienated from the society which he loathes.
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The camera cuts to a close-up of the front fender of Bickle’s cab as he hypnotically drives through the streets filled with boisterous pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and drifters. Here, Chapman executes a subjective POV cut by first using a medium shot of Bickel in his cab driving through the city at night; he establishes that Bickle is looking, or the audience would not know whose POV it is. Second, Bickle is shown turning his head to look at something outside the cab, letting the audience know that the next shot will show what he is looking at. The third shot is Bickle’s view of the brightly lit unreserved marquees and abundant sidewalk sex as he drives on his nightly shift. These shots work together to involve the audience both visually and emotionally that portray the delicate balance between violence and the sexual promiscuity that Bickle must drive through and is disgusted by; the fact that the audience can feel his disgust speaks to the power of subjective POV as a visual device.
There are undercurrents in the film the audience can sense that are not explicitly said but are subtly revealed by Chapman in Travis Bickle’s subjective POV. Bickle’s POV shots are slowed down using varying speeds to suggest a heightened level of perception. Chapman uses this technique to better convey Bickle’s ambivalent feelings about sex: he lives in a world of pornography, frequents the porno districts, and spends his free time watching triple-X rated porno films that are all shown in real time, yet the sex he observes in the city from his cab, shown in slow motion, fills him with loathing. Bickle detests the hookers and street-corner pimps he sees; the sex of buying, selling, and the using of people feed his anger into a hatred for the creeps he closely observes, which is made excruciating and awful through the use of slower motion.
To further emphasize Bickle’s disconnect from the societal interactions he watches all around him, Chapman cleverly uses close-ups of observed details to show how Bickle’s attention is detaching from the conversations in which he is a participant. In a scene at an all-night diner that Bickle and his cabbie friends frequent, the other cabbies are telling stories that make a connection between sex and violence common to the cabbie’s vocation, and Bickle becomes lost in his own mind. While describing the vicious work environment of the cabbie with the latest violence perpetrated against another cab driver, Bickle, in a distressed disposition, dumps an Alka-Seltzer tablet into a glass of water on the table. As Bickle looks down at the glass, the camera cuts to a close-up of it bubbling away and zooms in to end on an extreme close-up of the erupting, fizzing action and lingers. In this motivated camera movement, the fizzing glass becomes symbolic of Bickle’s descent into a boiling, fermenting hatred for the city inhabited by scum, so volatile that he could explode at any moment.
In the most poignant moment of the story, one that is free from violence, Bickle gets dumped after he sabotages his relationship with Betsy, a young campaign worker, by taking her out on a date to watch a pornographic film. In a medium shot, which makes the audience more involved in the action and dialogue, Chapman frames Bickle in a bare hallway on the phone in his desperate attempt to apologize. At the moment Bickle’s attempts prove to be ineffective, the camera slowly dollies away from him to the right to settle on a fixed shot of the long, barren hallway. This type of camera movement is most effective where the second frame amplifies the meaning of the first. Bickle’s failed attempt at a healthy relationship with an upper-middle-class woman and his ensuing rejection is too painful to watch. It is his awkward date and abrupt, ungracious rejection that sends Bickle into his downward spiral of isolation and violence. The violence and final massacre are shown in slow motion and close-up so that the audience can see the gruesomeness in greater detail, yet they cannot bear to confront his painful rejection.
The visual world that Chapman creates in 'Taxi Driver' (1976) plays an integral role in how the audience comprehends the story and how they will come to understand Travis Bickel and his motivations. The conceptual tools of visual storytelling that Chapman uses supply meaning to the viewer in ways other than words to add another level of meaning in addition to the dialogue and action.
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