Camerawork
Several styles of camerawork in Taxi Driver reveal
Travis's loneliness and his distance from society. In general, the
shots in Taxi Driver are slow and deliberate. After
Travis applies to be a taxi driver, he walks out of the dispatcher
garage, and as he does so, the camera pans from right to left across
the screen as the cabs drive right, in the opposite direction. The
other taxis seem to be going forward, in the direction we read and
in the direction that picture narratives usually move. Travis walks
the other way, and he is moving in the wrong direction even faster
than the camera, so it takes a few moments for the camera to catch
up to him. The shot indicates that something isn't quite right about
Travis. Something about him isn't going the right way.
Much later, when Travis has begun his descent into psychosis,
the editing reveals his disjointed state. As Travis turns toward
the camera and his voiceover reads a section from his diary ("Listen
you fuckers, you screwheads. . . . "), the scene suddenly stops
and repeats itself. The cut is so abrupt that it seems like a mistake.
The shots are close enough together that we can tell that the two
takes are not different, and that the same shot is shown twice in
a row. Travis repeats himself obsessively in the "You talkin' to
me" speech, and here the film itself adopts that same method. The
double shot shows that Travis does not repeat himself for practice,
as we might, but that each time he erases what came before. Practice,
by definition, involves improving on each additional effort, but
Travis acts as if the previous attempts never happened. This editing
technique of repetition and replacement gives us a glimpse into
Travis's quickly plummeting mental state.
Scorsese has said he believes that the most important
scene in Taxi Driver is the one showing Travis
on a payphone in a hallway, trying to speak to Betsy. As this one-sided
conversation takes place, the camera moves from Travis to a shot
of an empty hallway around the corner. No people or motion fill
the shot, and the hallway has no visual elements to attract the
eye. This camera move prevents us from looking at Travis in his
shame at losing Betsy, and the fact that neither participant in
the phone conversation is visible conveys the fact that no real
communication is taking place. The hallway suggests the path the
film will take from this point on. Soon after this conversation,
Travis changes from any lonely man to "God's lonely man," on a path
toward what he views as his destiny—a path as straight and narrow
as the hallway.
