5 Like Bresson’s thief (Michel), Schrader’s Travis and Frank are voyeurs, observing society from both a physical and emotional distance. Like Frank, Travis too will narrate his film, through the diary that we see him writing-one of the many things that the screenwriter of both films, Paul Schrader, borrowed from Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and Pickpocket (1959). The second shot in Taxi Driver is a close up of the eyes of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), scanning the streets of New York, likewise washed in a red glow ( Fig. 9.1) But the first close-up repeats the second shot of Taxi Driver (1976), Martin Scorsese’s third main feature, 3 the film that established him as a new excitement in American cinema, an excitement that has never gone away. “From the very first close-up of his face, we know that he’s already gone, completely gone.” 1 The film is narrated from behind those eyes, showing us what they see, the world as it appears and feels to the paramedic, Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage). These eyes almost immediately recur, in another close-up, just before the director’s credit. The film’s second shot-in a sequence of shots intercut between the main titles-is a close up of its protagonist’s weary eyes, bathed in the red and jaundiced light of passing vehicles. It is a film projected on other films, with earlier images behind or beneath its own: images written upon images. Bringing Out the Dead is like a palimpsest, a text written upon another, partly erased text, where some of the first still shows through.
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