· The film was ground-breaking for its reminiscing of killers like no other films of or before its time.
· The early 1930s were a heyday for gangster pictures. Not coincidentally, they were also a heyday for gangsters. But once Dillinger, Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the rest were eliminated — and once the Production Code started cracking down on depictions of crime in Hollywood movies — the trend of making films based on their exploits subsided, slinking to the background as the studios moved on to other genres.
· In 1967, Bonnie and Clyde brought the “true crime” movie back into vogue, modernized with graphic violence and frank sexual discussions. (“Graphic” and “frank” for the ’60s, that is. By 2010 standards, the violence would barely warrant an R rating, and the sex is comfortably PG-13.) There hadn’t been a rise in real-life gangster-style bank robberies. Instead, the film was the byproduct of four big things happening all at once in America:
· America was getting more violent in general. The war had something to do with this, but so did the Civil Rights movement, the disillusionment of the Baby Boomer generation, and other factors. Roger Ebert, who’d been a film critic for only six months when he reviewed Bonnie and Clyde, saw its graphic violence as a sobering and necessary reminder: “We are living in a period when newscasts refer casually to ‘waves’ of mass murders, [serial killer] Richard Speck’s photograph is sold on posters in Old Town and snipers in Newark pose for Life magazine…. Violence takes on an unreal quality.” There’d been riots in Philadelphia in 1964, Los Angeles in 1965, Cleveland in 1966. When Ebert reviewed Bonnie and Clyde, he’d just seen riots in Detroit, Tampa, Buffalo, and Newark, to name only a few. There were more to come. It was the “summer of love.” Things were crazy, man.
· The Hollywood Production Code was falling apart. Before we had the goofy rating system we have now (G, PG, R, etc.), there was the Production Code. Begun as a way for Hollywood to police itself and avoid government intervention, the Code didn’t have degrees of acceptability: either your movie was approved, or it wasn’t. And if it wasn’t, you couldn’t get most theaters to play it. Not having the Motion Picture Association of America’s “certificate of approval” was akin to being rated NC-17 today. But by the 1960s, that was beginning to change. Films like Some Like It Hot (1959) were being released without Code approval and becoming box-office hits anyway, weakening the Code’s power. The MPAA’s occasional exceptions to the Code further undermined its authority. (Look, are we sticking to this Code, or aren’t we?) Filmmakers started getting bolder. Bonnie and Clyde was “approved” despite its sex and violence, perhaps signifying that the Code had lost all meaning. It was scrapped shortly thereafter, replaced in November 1968 with a rating system close to the one we have now.
· The French New Wave had come to America. Movies like The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and Breathless (to name just a few) were getting attention in U.S. art houses because they were so different from what Hollywood was churning out. The characters in these films were usually young, iconoclastic, and free-spirited. Feminism and sexual liberation were taken for granted. The films had certain technical characteristics, too: quick cuts, zooms, stylized photography, abrupt changes in mood. Bonnie and Clyde is generally considered the first major American film to clearly borrow its story and tone from the New Wave, and was thus the first exposure that mainstream U.S. audiences had to this exciting new style of filmmaking. (Most people didn’t go to the art houses, after all.) The film’s built-in downer of an ending (spoiler: Bonnie and Clyde don’t live happily ever after) made it a natural fit, since that’s how New Wave movies tended to conclude anyway. In fact, the screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, originally pitched it to New Wavers Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, both of whom made suggestions but passed on directing it.
· Warren Beatty’s movie career had gotten off to a great start with Splendor in the Grass, in 1961, but had subsequently stalled. Frustrated and eager to take control, he became a producer, with Bonnie and Clyde as his first project. To direct it, Beatty hired Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker), whom he’d worked with on Mickey One in 1965. Though Penn was 45, he had a feel for what America’s youth culture was into. Mickey One was heavily influenced by New Wave; 1966’s The Chase addressed racism and violence; and he would later make Alice’s Restaurant (1969), about the counter-culture hippie movement.
Roger Ebert, an avid fan of the film once said that the one part of the famous mirror scene that never gets quoted is: "well I'm the only one here". And that is the line that perfectly describes Travis: He's simply a loner that can't deal with his emotions who has a tendency to lash out in anger and frustration. All the while being driven to madness by urban decay as he witnesses it passing by the streets of New York.
Taxi Driver
'Scorsese absorbed the
filming-on-the-fly flavour of the new cinema vert movement pioneered by Donn
Pennebakbr and ricky Leacock that was going on around him. The slice-of-life
influence would show up in his student films, then in Woodstock, and later in
the grittiness of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.' page
228 - 'Easy Riders, Raging
Bulls'
"No other film
has dramatised urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, its
horrifyingly funny and then just horrifying." page
119 - 'Easy Riders, Raging
Bulls'
Thoughts on
Taxi Driver:
- Scorsese
said the last shot of his eyes in the rear view mirror is meant to convey
that his impulses are not "cured," and it's possible he may
strike again.
·
- After
film school, Scorsese moved west to Hollywood.
- Roger
Corman, a pulp movie director and producer, hired him to direct Boxcar
Bertha in 1972.
- Scorsese's
first collaboration with Robert De Niro, who plays Travis in Taxi
Driver, was on Mean Streets (1974), a film about Catholic
Italian-Americans in Little Italy that was rooted in Scorsese's own
childhood experiences.
- The
film received huge critical acclaim, cementing Scorsese's reputation as a
major director.
- Scorsese
made Taxi Driver in the mid-1970s, a decade famous for its
diverse and innovative films.
- The 1970s
produced a group of directors, sometimes called the "film school
brats," that included Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin
Scorsese, George Lucas, and Brian de Palma. These men were young Americans
who had studied European filmmakers at film school, and they were also the
first generation of filmmakers to have grown up watching television.
- Their
movies feature close attention to technical detail, while demonstrating an
encyclopedic knowledge of film and television history.
- Taxi
Driver centre's on a racist, sociopathic, and violent protagonist and
features a twelve-year-old prostitute, but at the time of its release it
was a popular, well-received film.
- The
movie was critically acclaimed in the United States, received four Oscar
nominations, and did even better financially in Europe.
- Taxi
Driver presents a true-to-life portrait of what Manhattan once was.
Times Square was filled with peep shows and prostitutes, and during the
summer of 1975,
when the film takes place, the country was in the middle of a presidential
campaign where one of the main issues was moving beyond the Vietnam War,
which had officially ended only in 1973.
- We can
easily imagine an ex-marine in New York being disgusted by the filth,
finding the politicians who are supposed to help him to be artificial, and
feeling that he needs to approach the city as he would a special combat
mission.
“When I set out to write the script,
I thought it was about loneliness. As I wrote it I found out that it was about
something a little different and more interesting. Which was self-imposed
loneliness. That is a syndrome of behaviour that reinforces itself. And the
touch stones of that kind of behaviour are all kinds of contradictory impulses;
purism and pornography. I’ve gotta get healthy! Whilst popping pills at the
same time. A dreadful diet. They’re all these things he does to make sure he’ll
never get to where he’s going. He does so, so he can reinforce his own doomed
condition to view himself as a victim, a loser.” – Paul Schradder
·
The Graduate:
· How “in love” are they really? – Both
of their dates went very badly and the idea that Elain would get over Ben’s
revelation itself is unbelievable.
· He takes a break from the graduating
celebration and stares into his fish tank: as if the fish represent him, and
the tank represents his feeling of being trapped inside a “plastic” (fake)
world.
· The Sound Of Silence is a notable
score to the film. Opening: There’s silence, but he is not alone. Ending:
There’s still silence but he is not alone. He feels alone.
· Up until this point in his life, it
is suggested that he had never rested on his laurels; with all his achievements
and accolades. He seems to had been living the life of a robot; obeying his
parents every command. He had become their prized possession: in fact he’s
“showcased” at the beginning of the film as such following his university
graduation.
· That is until the boredom of such is
disrupted by Mrs Robinson. After their affair, he is now actually going to try
to live differently. Without Mrs Robinson, of whom seems similarly unhappy with
her situation as to Ben, coursing Ben its likely he would’ve carried on the
same road his parents put him on.
· The graduate is the story of someone
who desires significant change to his mundane life, but doesn’t quite know what
change in particular. It is my belief that by the end of the film he finally
understands what he wants to change about his life, but (perhaps) realises he
has not quite done it yet.
Contextual
Study Plan:
Mention of how the American new wave, like the French new wave promoted
change in world cinema.
2. Mention
of the first new wave of American cinema in the 1950’s; what it was that made
them so different.
3. Mention
of the 1960’s new wave of cinema; why the films were different.
The
introduction of new wave cinema by the French
2.
Description of a couple of the ways they’re films were different and new.
3.
Definition of the term “new wave” in general
4. What a
“new wave” in film meant audiences could see
What New
wave he is going to discuss and what era of he it he is going to discuss.
2. What
films he will be focussing his research around, along with who directed them
and their year of release.
3. Why he
has chosen these films in general and what importance they had to offer to
American cinema.
4. What
he’s going to discuss regarding these films (‘the social conditions of the production of the film and study its
cultural impact’)
