Scorcese makes few attempts to particularize these themes to Travis’s surroundings, instead requiring the audience to harbor the same vague sense of general filth that plagues his protagonist. Despite its apparent rejection of generic convention, Taxi Driver is not without stylistic and thematic precedent. Film noir, a style of film dominant roughly from the earlyforties to latefifties, also features expressionist photography that captures morally and psychologically unstable rotagonists making their way through dark and corrupt cities. Generally, these films’ heroes were rough, “hardboiled” detectives/investigators torn from the pages of dime novels. As the style of film noir evolved, “Hollywood lighting grew darker, characters more corrupts, themes more fatalistic, and the tone more hopeless” (Schrader 1972).
Later, the protagonists and the worlds they inhabited grew increasingly chaotic, until the characters, settings, and themes ceased to be identifiable as film noir.
Films, like Chinatown (Polanski 1974) revived many of the themes of films noir, but stopped short of seriously employing the stylistic trends of the earlier films. According to John Cawelti (1979), Chinatown is a genericallytransformed film noir, consciously adapting certain elements from an preceding style or genre, and recasting them with a degree of selfconsciousness, or even parody.
In much the same way that Chinatown pastiches the plots and thematics of many films noir, Taxi Driver borrows many of films’ stylistic features, changes their stories to fit a contemporary society, and even turns to those artistic movements which anticipated and influenced the initial development of film noir. Taxi Driver, then, is a radicalized film noir, a work of noirlike cinematography which masks the lingering traces of order, stability, or meaning left over from the noirworlds of the late 1950s.
The Essay on My Film Noir Class
Film noir is a type of film that is characterized by its dark somber tone and cynical pessimistic mood. This type of film mostly applies to Hollywood films of the? 40 s and? 50 s. For example? Double Indemnity? and? Chinatown? are two film noir classics. Although all film noir movies share common stories, these two in particularly share many characteristics of this film type.The two films were ...
The film seeks out the limits of characteristically noir subjects like corruption and lossofidentity, and finding none, continues what 1950snoir began, expressing the limitlessness of these subjects through style and theme. Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver’s screenplay, outlines his view of film noir in his essay “Notes on Film Noir” (1972).
Combining Schrader’s notes with Cawelti’s theory of generic transformation, we see that
