TAXI DRIVER as Bicentennial Film Politics, Culture, Intertextuality (original) (raw)

2017, University Film & Video Association conference

This essay examines Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) as a Bicentennial opus, filled with all the sociocultural contradictions of that era: racial strife, economic "stagflation," rampant crime and violence, gender tensions, post-Vietnam War angst, political cynicism, and the Ford-Carter presidential election of the same year. In addition to these socio-thematic questions, the film's aesthetic derives from a variety of intertextual sources: classic film noir (albeit in color), John Cassavetes's cinéma-vérité "realism"; Michael Powell's Technicolor expressionism; the modernist European art cinema of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard; and, of course, John Ford's The Searchers.