idea ·Taxi Driver (1976)

Chapman pushed the night stock

Taxi Driver's wet neon look came from over-developing night-rated Technicolor stock — a 1970s laboratory habit, not a lighting package.

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lighting
camerawork
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For Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), director of photography Michael Chapman "pushed" the night-rated Technicolor stock in development to capture the neon-lit night worlds so crucial to the movie's style and themes.

— David A. Cook — A History of Narrative Film, hnf 694

Pushing means deliberately under-exposing and then over-developing to recover the image: it buys sensitivity and costs grain and colour fidelity. The steam, the smeared neon, the blacks that never quite settle — those are a laboratory decision as much as a lighting one.

Cook files Chapman with a cohort: Nestor Almendros pushing for Days of Heaven, Vilmos Zsigmond flashing the negative on McCabe & Mrs. Miller to fade it toward Andrew Wyeth (hnf 694). Worth remembering that the whole New Hollywood "look" is substantially a set of processing tricks that let cameras go where they previously could not.

Filed under Colour and Lighting. Set it against The red tint over the bloodbath: one colour decision made in the lab by choice, one made in the lab under duress, in the same film.

Go on, then

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 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.
idea The red tint over the bloodbath The muted colour of Taxi Driver's massacre is regularly praised as a stylistic choice. It was the price of an R rating.
idea Bresson's hands, Travis's guns The gun-handling sequences copy the pickpocketing in Bresson's Pickpocket. The debt is Schrader's; Scorsese admits he finds Bresson hard to watch.
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.