idea ·Taxi Driver (1976)

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.

camerawork
mise-en-scene
atomic
scorsese
authorship

There are other links between Mean Streets and Taxi Driver that may go unnoticed. One is the "priest's-eye-view" often used in overhead shots, which Scorsese has said are intended to reflect the priest looking down at the implements of the Mass on the altar. We see, through Travis's eyes, the top of a taxi dispatcher's desk, candy on a movie counter, guns on a bed, and finally, with the camera apparently seeing through the ceiling, an overhead shot of the massacre in the red-light building. This is, if you will, the final sacrifice of the Mass.

— Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert (this scan carries no page numbers)

Ebert makes the same point elsewhere in the same book: the overheads "mirror the priest's-eye-view of the altar", and Travis holds his fist over a gas flame exactly as Charlie holds his hand in the votive candle in Mean Streets.

Why this is worth a note rather than a footnote. Most accounts of the overhead shot in Taxi Driver — the shoot-out reach for "godlike", "detached" or "clinical". The liturgical reading is both more specific and better evidenced — it comes from the director — and it changes the object: an altar view is not detached, it is attentive, and what it attends to is a set of objects arranged for a rite. Guns on a bed. Candy on a counter. Bodies on a floor.

Filed under Camerawork. It is also the clearest single instance of Personal context in the wiki: a formal habit that runs across a director's whole filmography and traces to his childhood rather than to his cinephilia. Compare Martin Scorsese.

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 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.
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.
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.
idea De Niro wrote in the margins De Niro's annotated shooting script rewrote Travis's dialogue, and the changes reached Schrader's final draft. The film's most quoted line has no screenwriter.