In the last week of my Introduction to Film class, we focused on the fall of the Studio System in Hollywood and its impact on the type of movies that began to be developed. We also looked at editing, and the different techniques used to convey moods within film. With this in mind, we primarily focused on the movie Taxi Driver [IMC DVD 306.74 T235 2007], but also watched a clip from Battleship Potemkin [IMC DVD 947.083 B336 2007].
Taxi Driver was a movie that I had seen before, but it was very illuminating to be able to spend the time analyzing it, especially through the lens of film editing. Right off the bat, Scorsese breaks film tradition by not opening the scene with an establishing shot. Instead, we get a smoky scene from whence a taxi emerges. From there, we get a shot of an unknown person’s eyes. Finally, we switch to a street scene, but it is blurry and nebulous. This whole opening sequence is designed to disorient the audience, and it does just that. Thus Scorsese does “establish” his movie, but through a mood instead of a temporal and physical location. The feeling of disorientation continues through the whole movie, as we are introduced to Travis, his life, and his abject loneliness. The editing of the movie helps to further this mood, especially in the scenes where Travis is beginning to descend into madness. These scenes, the most iconic of which is the scene where he talks to himself (“Are you talking to me?”), are characterized by choppy editing, a montage of jump cuts, which put the audience on edge. We can see that Travis is losing his sanity, and the editing reflects the disjointedness of his brain. With the fall of the studio system, more and more movies were experimenting with breaking the rules, as Scorsese did with his establishing shot.
However, this form of experimental editing was not as new as you might think. Battleship Potemkin utilized the same type of choppy editing techniques during its famous Odessa Step scene. It starts with several quick jump cuts of a woman’s face, then has a long sequence of shots of both the people fleeing and the soldiers pursuing. The tempo between these different cuts increases as the scene progresses, which increases the viewer’s anxiety. The audience is left deliberately confused, because it reflects on the scene and how the people are feeling. Battleship Potemkin, the film as a whole, is a series of montages, and the power of those montages are a result of superb editing.
I hope you learned as much as I did from our Introduction to Film series. Stay tuned for my next posting and keep following along at https://letterboxd.com/peterstanley/list/1001-movies-you-must-see-before-you-die/ .
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