What I learned from Taxi Driver

Film festival is this week. A chance to show all our hard work to the waiting world! As you can imagine, it's a stressful week. There is a lot of pressure on first time directors, producers editors and sound people to put their best foot forward and represent not just our own work but the work of the camera crew, production designers etc etc.

It's been a mad dash to the finish for us. Getting final cuts, last minute changes, music selection, sound mix, colour grading, exporting to a file the festival needs, transferring data to the festival organizers, writing up synopses-es and statements from directors. It's all stressful and time consuming.

Tonight I sat around and listened to some students discuss the merits of two digital camera... Red and the new Arriflex, duscussing lattitude and other equally exciting technical aspects of the new digital realm debating which on they'd rather the scho should by for them to use next term. For three guys who have never shot a real film in their lives, nor put their hands on either camera, they spoke with the confidence and expertise of grizzled hollywood veterans.

So a couple of us went out to see Taxi Driver at 7 over at the Danby Theater in Newtown. It's this little boutique style theater in a trendy neighborhood frequented by students and lesbians. Mmm, lesbians... I digress, um, right, Taxi Driver. Brillant film. Put boylth scorsece and dinero on the map. The film was shot in 76. At the time Eastman Kodak ws supplying fairly shitty 35 mm film. Taxi driver is grainy as hell, and typical of many 70s flicks, it the colour isn't perfect. In darker scenes the black is too black. The contrast is too high in spots. In others they desaturated the film to take the red out if the blood so they could get an r18 rating.

Given all that, it's still a great movie. Sit and talk about lattitude and resolution all you want, fact is, you can make a great movie with grainy film. No one in the audience gives a shit if you've memorized a bunch of spec sheets.

Halfway through the movie it stopped, froze, then restarted... Out of sync. The projectionist stopped it, took us back to the place it freaked out at and hit play. Life goes on. It will be the same at our student festival. Glitches will happen. Things will have been missed. Life will go on.

I'm glad I went to see Taxi Driver tonight. Ive learned so much!