Taxi Driver was a watershed in American popular cinema. It established the vocabulary for a new kind of cinema, one rooted in an immediate sensual present and a self-conscious awareness of cinema past. It was written, in the first place, out of Paul Schrader’s own period of blackest depression, of loneliness and frustration and aimless driving about the cityoit was an ‘animal’, as he put it, that jumped out of his head. To an extent, it remains an untamed beast, with a mood of misanthropy and misogyny that New York taxi driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) gives off and that the film too often indulges. But between them, Schrader and Scorsese explore the 101 varieties of urban madness with a stunning visceral immediacy, even while making their own connections to the past, to the xenophobia and self-destructive obsession of that touchstone of the Movie Brat generation, John Ford’s The Searchers. Everything in the film seems to spring from one personality, and we are forced to share Bickle’s monocular vision of New York as an open sewer seething with desperate people who can be saved only by his final exorcism through violence.

U.S.A., 1976.
With: Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster.
Colour.
114 mins.