INSTRUCTOR: The brief opening sequence of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver sets the film's styles and themes, and without dialogue or narrative exposition, hints at its place in both American and film history. The first image we see is of a taxi at night emerging from a cloud of smoke as if rising up from hell. And the film's title appears in taxicab yellow on the smoke, followed by the opening credits.

The film cuts to an extreme closeup, of a man's gaze lit alternately by red and white lights. This is the taxi driver of the title. We see a point of view shot of a rain-smeared windshield. Neon streaks of red, white, and blue dissolve into jittery patterns, abstracting the city streets. Another dissolve, and then the director credit is superimposed on a shot of pedestrians crossing, turned to gaze at the driver and at us.

When the film cuts back to the extreme closeup, the taxi driver's straining eyes shift like windshield wipers. Travis Bickle, the alienated Vietnam vet who is the film's protagonist, has not yet said a word. Later, in similar nighttime cruising sequences, Travis's voiceover will share an apocalyptic vision of New York as a city of filth and sin awaiting redemption.

But already in the opening sequence, the colors of the American flag bleed together, and the taciturn protagonist evokes iconic American genre heroes. Scorsese's film is perhaps the iconic text of the new American cinema of the 1970s. It pays tribute to studio filmmaking of Hollywood's classical era while taking the violence of westerns and gangster films to unheard of extremes. In doing so, it perverts the western standard of heroism and produces a vision shaped in equal measure by the existential questioning and innovative style of the French New Wave and by the horrors of the televised war and political violence at home.

Bickle drives a cab because he can't sleep nights. As his paranoia grows, he arms himself, gets in shape, and keeps a diary of his misguided ambitions to clean up the city. A famous and disturbing central sequence opens with a shot of Travis twirling a pistol gunslinger style as he faces himself in the mirror. A cut shows him shrugging on his army jacket over his weaponry. We seem him framed in the mirror. A rapid pan takes in his apartment and stops on Travis, now facing the mirror and facing us.

He draws his gun. "Faster than you," he mutters. As he continues to confront his reflection, he appears to become more and more dissociated. The film doesn't show us the reverse shot, Travis's reflection, but we can imagine how provoking its gaze and words must be to the paranoid character on screen. The reflections double. "You talking to me?" he famously demands.

Time elapses. Signaled by dissolves and accompanied by Travis's asynchronous expletive-laden voiceover, we are seeing repeated action now. The film uses overlapping editing. Its own narration becomes jumpy, like Travis's.

The film then cuts to an overhead shot of Travis stretched out on his bed. The text is inspired by the diaries of a would-be assassin, Arthur Bremer, and it speaks of Travis in the third person. "Here is a man who would not take it anymore." The jump cut shows the revolutionary influence of the European art cinema style on new Hollywood cinema.

At the same time, the breakdown in classical continuity editing is motivated by the protagonist's mental breakdown. Travis's last comment, "You're dead," is seemingly addressed to us. We've become completely disassociated from our forced identification with Bickle, whose point of view has been foisted on us from the first extreme closeup of his eyes. How can the rest of the film play out after this psychotic break?

A rupture of everyday reality figured in the film also refers to a historical break. The trauma of Vietnam, student protests, and assassinations meant that the heroics of Cold War genre films could no longer appear innocent. At the film's conclusion, Travis has transformed into a vigilante killer, shooting everyone in sight in an attempt to rescue the young prostitute played by Jodie Foster.

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INSTRUCTOR: The ghastly image of Travis with his bloodied finger pointed at his temple at the end of the sequence resembles the mirror sequence in its disturbing confusion between self and other, and subject and object of violence. John Ford's The Searchers is the model for this rescue of a young girl who doesn't want to be saved, and Travis's mohawk and blood-spattered face bring out the savage violence of the classical western.

The camera retraces Travis's path of entry into the building with a smooth backwards sweep that takes in the carnage he's left in his wake before showing the neighborhood commotion, paying homage to the virtuosic camera movements of a filmmaker like Orson Welles. The audience's point of view, linked to Travis's from the opening credits, has finally been severed from his perspective.

Blue police cars and white lights replace, but in some sense complete, the horrific tableau of red from the blood. In a coda, we find that Travis has become a hero for his actions. And so, one of the most influential new Hollywood films ends with a cynical take on American media and its audiences.