Kann mir mal bitte einer erklaeren, wie die Suchfunktion funktioniert? Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, dass es zu diesem Film kein Thema gibt...
Falls es eins gibt, dieses Forum bitte schliessen.
Was ich eigentlich sagen will: Meine naechste Hausarbeit wird sich um "Taxi Driver" drehen. Ich spiele mit dem Gedanken, den Film auf seine Gemeinsamkeiten mit dem Westerngenre zu untersuchen. Irgendwelche Gedanken oder Vorschlaege dazu? Literaturtips? Interviews, Videos etc.?
Wenn ich Taxi Driver suche finde ich auch nur das Topic, das du heute erstellt hast. Ich fürchte, es gibt sonst keines
Dieser Satz hilft ihm wahrscheinlich auch nicht.Zitat von Laschi
Ich benutze in der Regel nur die Suchspalte direkt auf der Startseite des Forums und lasse die erweiterte Suchfunktion weg. Meistens existieren dann sogar überraschend noch kein Thema zu dem gesuchten Film sollte die Suchfunktion nichts erbracht haben, wie auch bei Casino mit Robert De Niro was mir gerade auffällt.
Was mich schon wundert, wie dich wahrscheinlich auch, dass allgemein zu keinem Zeitpunkt über Taxi Driver geschrieben wurde, was ich mir nicht vorstellen könnte. An dieser Stelle auch allgemein, zeigt die Suchfunktion nur erstellte Themen an und muss man in der erweiterten Suchfuktion speziell nach dem gesuchten Begriff in Beiträgen suchen, damit das gesuchte Wort auch in Beiträgen angezeigt wird die in andere Themen geschrieben wurden?
Wegen deiner Hausarbeit fällt mir als erstes nur die Prostituierte ein die eventuell mit einer Hure aus einem Saloon zu vergleichen wäre. Du meinst Parallelen die man aus Taxi Driver mit dem aus einem Westerngenre typischen Film ziehen kann oder? Gar nicht so einfach. Das Rotlichtmilieu lässt sich vielleicht auch wie eine kleine Westernstadt darstellen in die Robert De Niro als Fremder tritt, und es Westerngenretypisch ein wenig aufmischt.
Ich habe leider auch keine früheren Einträge zu Taxi Driver finden können, dafür weise ich dich gerne auf den neuen Taxi Driver-Bildband beim Taschen Verlag, welcher dort in mehrfacher Ausführung 2010 erschienen ist, hin:Der Preis dieser Ausgaben liegt zwischen 750 und 2000€
If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed. (Stanley Kubrick)
Hier mal mein Paper zum Film, wer also zuviel Zeit hat:
“Taxi Driver” and what inspired its violence.
Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” is considered to be one of the greatest achievements in American film history. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including “Best Picture” in 1977 and won the Cannes Film Festival competition of 1976. As of today, the website imdb.com ranks it as number 41 on the list of the best films of all time. The production of this film took place in what is now known as the New Hollywood era. Films of that era would break conventions, tell different narratives and allude to different films and directors. They were shot in a time of cultural and political upheavals , something that is also a theme of “Taxi Driver”.
Noel Carroll uses the term “cinema of allusion” and means that New Hollywood films distinguished themselves through a shared practice of allusionistic interplay. The reason for numerous allusions in New Hollywood films might be found in the origin of their creators. Scorsese, Coppola and others were often film-school educated, their vast consumption of films making them aware of movies outside what Hollywood was offering. Many allusions can be found in Scorsese’s film, they all can be adapted to Carroll’s definition of allusion as “(…) quotations, the memorialization of past genres, homages, and the recreation of ‘classic’ scenes, shots, plot motifs, lines of dialogue, themes, gestures, and so forth from film history (…).” The films that Scorsese most prominently quotes are John Ford’s “The Searchers”, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” among others. In this paper I claim that Scorsese’s references of other films of film historical significance is due to the fact that the different and difficult times the film was shot in led to the re-consideration of older films. Because the films that inspired many aspects of Scorsese’s film included violence in a very prominent way, it is only logical that “Taxi Driver” is as violent as it is. Violence in general was an issue of New Hollywood films, when one thinks of examples like “Bonnie And Clyde” or “The Godfather”. In this paper I will look at the connection between “Taxi Driver” and “The Searchers” and “Psycho” in a little more detail, other films will be considered without excessive analysis. It should be noted that due to formal exigencies this paper will cannot the full details of referentiality in “Taxi Driver”.
Looking at Travis Bickle one cannot help but think that this man is deranged. In fact, it is also feasible to argue that it is not only him but the whole world that seems crazy. Travis cannot sleep, even when he has worked for hours; previous to becoming a taxi driver, he wanders around in New York. His behavior is not stringent, he can be pleasant as well as angry; he is often tense and distrustful and not able to communicate to the full extent. He seems anxious. Marie Connelly suggests that the film’s subtitle should be “Age of Anxiety” and she has “no doubt Travis’s anxiety mirrors our own as well as that of the 1970s.” By 1976 the United States had undergone some radical changes. The war in Vietnam was a national trauma, the Watergate-scandal led to the only resignation of an American president in history, the upheavals of the counter-culture changed political views and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X concussed the American public. These (among others) were events that were “emblematic of a breakdown in societal and psychic order and predate the genesis of “Taxi Driver”. The classic image of the white male as a leader was shattered, leading to them feeling powerless. The rules of the past did no longer apply. Many Vietnam veterans, like Travis, whose military background is suggested, “struggled to adjust in the posttrauma [sic!], and committed suicide [as Travis tries at the end of the film] or exploded into violence in large numbers.” In culture “porno-chic” was introduced by the success of films like “Deep Throat” or in new horror films, like David Cronenberg’s “Shivers” and “Rabid” and added to the downfall of old values. This is featured in “Taxi Driver”. Although Travis is disgusted by the “scum” as he puts it, he frequently returns to 42nd street and Times Square, then basically a red light district, if we are willing to believe Scorsese’s vision, not because he likes it in his own mysterious way, but because it feeds his anger.
The beginning of the 70s also marks a point in time, when reactionary vigilante-films like “Dirty Harry” and “Death Wish” were massive successes at the box office. These films were well-known, also because of their violence. They dealt with the same anxiety “Taxi Driver” deals with. In both films characters that appear to be avatars of the counter-culture are attacked and consequently killed by reactionary vigilantes. Hollywood studio films had become more violent for almost two decades before “Taxi Driver”, Hitchcock’s “Psycho” marking a change of pace. It is feasible to argue that the zeitgeist of the end-sixties and first years of the seventies strongly influenced the films made then. Violence was not the only aspect of the time which made it into the movies. Screenwriter Paul Schrader had worked as a film critic and in this function he did some work on the Film Noir of the forties and fifties. Characterizing the final phase of that movie era, between 1949 and 1953, Schrader wrote about Film Noir-protagonists and in doing so foreshadowed how he would later construct Travis Bickle in his screenplay for “Taxi Driver”:
“(…) a hero who started to go bananas. The psychotic killer…now became the active protagonist;…film noir’s final phase was the most aesthetically and sociologically piercing. After ten years of steadily shedding romantic conventions, the later noir films finally got down to the root causes of the period: the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity, and, finally, psychic stability.”
Some might say that Travis Bickle is indeed “bananas”, he definitely becomes a killer. Assuming he really is a Vietnam veteran, his honor is disgraced by the movements of the time. Heroic conventions do no longer apply, not even in mainstream films, were Dirty Harry is an ambiguous character, man of the law on the one side, lawless vigilante on the other. “Taxi Driver” has more connections to the Film Noir and the films of Alfred Hitchcock that deserve a little more attention.
Bernard Herrmann was a longtime collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock. He also scored “Taxi Driver”, the last film score he finished before he passed away on Christmas 1975. The sheer fact that he is mostly known for composing music for the master of suspense is already an allusion, but it seems that Herrmann also connected Scorsese’s film directly with “Psycho”. The last three chords of the soundtrack are taken from the score of Hitchcock’s masterpiece. In his book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls”, Peter Biskind calls the score haunting and sees more connections, like in the appearance of femmes fatales, paranoid consciousness, metropolitan malaise, rain-soaked streets, neon lights, low-key lightning and voice-over-narration. As a result “Taxi Driver” becomes a “neo-noir.” The neon-lights refer to the red-light district like appearance of Times Square etc. Paranoid consciousness refers to the shattered perception of the white male, LoBrutto wrote about. Low-key lighting is found especially at the end of the film, but in all moments the film portrays night. All the aspects Schrader and Biskind suggest are aspects that seem to define a certain mood that is associated with the sixties and seventies. Audiences watching “Taxi Driver” and “Psycho” would often feel dislocated, because of the unfamiliar narratives these films offered. These films were “creating a world and a state of mind so enclosed and so unknowable that the viewer is fooled for attempting to understand it.” These feelings reflected the feelings many people would experience outside the movie theater, when facing radical changes in society and their lives respectively.
Another film genre that is important to take into consideration when thinking about “Taxi Driver” is the western. Many prominent films of the New Hollywood era (including those, which are not considered part of it) were set in either San Francisco or New York. In these urban environments which had the reputation of being the center of the events that shaped the era, it was “urban westerns” like “Taxi Driver” that proffered proffering a patently reactionary mediation of the time’s social and political turmoil. The film that scholars and critics alike have identified as the closest western relative to Scorsese’s film is John Ford’s “The Searchers”. Amy Taubin calls it the “ur-text” for “Taxi Driver”. Ford’s protagonist Ethan Edwards bears strong similarities to Travis Bickle. Like the Vietnam veteran, Ethan has also fought in a war, which has harmed him, at least psychically. He hates Indians, which is one of the reasons why he goes on the search for Debbie, just like Travis seems to hold a certain contempt towards African-Americans, which can be seen in his gaze and the fact that he kills a black shoplifter, although he could just as well stay back and wait for the situation to end without violence. Travis’s image of women is old-fashioned, naïve and almost chauvinist, Betsy is pure to him, once she rejects him however he holds nothing but hatred against her (“She’s like all the others (…) cold like a union.”). Iris’s lifestyle is one that he passionately opposes. Ethan Edwards holds the same “virgin-or-whore”-mentality in his dealing with Debbie. Bickle and Edwards, are alienated and do not fit into the society they are supposed to be a part of. The taxi driver reminds the audience very much of a cowboy, wearing boots, a western-style shirt and living in an apartment that includes only the most basic and necessary assets, in a way similar to the living circumstances of a cowboy, who will only have with him on his horse what he needs to survive and nothing more. The name “Travis” and the Bowie-knife he uses during the massacre make a connection to the western myth of the battle at the Alamo. This myth is as old and out-of-fashion by 1976, as is the afore mentioned image of the white male as the American hero. As I claimed before this downfall of American self-images is a result of the disillusion that is to a great part the result of the Vietnam War. The lone hero in “Taxi Driver” (with his modern horse, the car) is deconstructed in so far, that at the end of the film one cannot really identify him as a hero any longer, nor as a villain respectively. “Taxi Driver” therefor picks up an idea that is not exactly new in 1976. A film that uses the western in order to deconstruct American myths even further is Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch”, where the characters’ foray into Mexico is an analogy on the American campaign in Vietnam.
In this term paper I have argued that “Taxi Driver” is a violent film, because of the events and films that inspired it. The 1970s were a moment in time, were the United States had for the first time lost a war, namely the Vietnam War. Returning soldiers were greeted by the results of the protest culture that emerged against the war. Political figures had been killed and relatively new organizations like the women’s and the black civil rights movement had changed society. Many people felt insecure in such a society and films like “Dirty Harry” offered easy solutions to this insecurity. “Taxi Driver” is a variation on these vigilante films, however its violence cannot exclusively be explained with the zeitgeist. Martin Scorsese is part of what is known as the “Movie-brats” and therefore was able to see the connections between older films, namely Film Noir, Horror (as in Hitchcock-films) and Westerns. “Taxi Driver” uses the cinematic codes of these films and thus becomes a film full of allusions. As a result it must be concluded that the violence in “Taxi Driver” is only a further development of the violent ways of westerns or the violence as seen in “Psycho”. The trigger for this was the anxiety of the 1970s films.
Für wen oder was hast Du das denn geschrieben?
Das ist das Ergebnis
@Danwalker
Da du den Kontext der 70er stark deine Besprechung miteinbeziehst, könnte dich vielleicht Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" (1998 ) - von manchen gelobt, von anderen zerfetzt, aber doch aufschlussreich - interessieren. Ich empfand die Lektüre seinerzeit als spannend.
krx~9tf*lb8ouuuu% - Blog
Hab ich schon vor Jahren gelesen. DAS Standardwerk ueber New Hollywood
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