idea ·Taxi Driver (1976)

Bickle sees through glass

The windscreen and the rear-view mirror are the film's two apertures. Travis is a viewer before he is an actor, and the film is careful about which passengers he is allowed to see.

point-of-view
camera-as-voyeur
mise-en-scene
atomic
close-reading

The cab is a viewing apparatus. Travis watches the street through a windscreen and watches his passengers in a rear-view mirror, and both are screens.

Bickle's job flirts with social relationships and allows for a rearview-mirror voyeurism that aligns with his compulsive viewing of television and pornography. Through his rearview mirror, he possesses the passengers, their power or sexual prowess (notably, the film only focuses on passengers of his who have these two qualities, ignoring the others).

— Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese, smc 397

The parenthesis is the sharpest observation there and the easiest to miss: the film does not show us a representative sample of fares. It shows the ones that feed him. The selection is the characterisation.

The corollary, from Julian Rice, is the film's arc in one sentence: it "is about a man who begins as a viewer of life, through the 'screen' of his cab window, who then goes through the looking glass to become an 'actor' in a personal fantasy" (smc 397). The looking glass is literal — see Taxi Driver — the mirror.

Filed under Point of view and Camera as voyeur. The obvious comparison is Psycho — the parlour scene and Norman's peephole: both films hand the audience a character's aperture and then make the audience uncomfortable about having used it. See also Mulvey, published the year Taxi Driver was shot.

Go on, then

scene Taxi Driver — the phone call Travis begs Betsy down a payphone and the camera walks away from him, into an empty corridor. Scorsese thought of this shot first and filmed it last.
idea Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view Scorsese's flat overhead inserts come from watching a priest lay out the implements of the Mass on an altar — not from any film.
idea The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid Scorsese names one Hitchcock film as the source of Taxi Driver's camera moves — and it is the documentary-flat one, not the famous ones.
film Taxi Driver (1976) A returned soldier drives nights through a city he wants to wash away. Scorsese's first acknowledged masterpiece — and the wiki's best case of point of view doing the work of an argument.
scene Taxi Driver — the mirror "You talkin' to me?" — the most quoted line in the film is not in the film's script. De Niro wrote it standing up, in a derelict building, over traffic noise.
scene Taxi Driver — the shoot-out Three men dead in a stairwell, a camera that floats out through the ceiling, and an audience that cheered. Scorsese wanted a catharsis; he got applause, and it frightened him.