Critical reading of the audiovisual narrative as a source of information in Taxi Driver

Abstract

From a critical reading methodology, this article focus on the fiction film as an audio-visual document. The starting hypothesis considers how the audio-visual narrative is able to represent, through its reflective reading, the spirit of an era. Some social phenomena such as loneliness can be understood in a deeper way from the subjective gaze of an author and his fictional work. Since recent decades, living alone has ceased to be statistically marginally or socially bizarre. On the one hand, it has become a vital opportunity to achieve personal goals; on the other, it has come to be a social problem involving an increasing number of individuals. Through a reading essay on the audio-visual narrative, this article examines how loneliness is made sensitive to viewers through the case study of the film Taxi Driver, with the script of Paul Schrader and the direction of Martin Scorsese. The film examines how this loneliness is embodied through the staging of a script in which writing a personal diary is key to rationalizing the documentary images of an historical period.