Taxi Driver

Rating: 8/10 (11 December 2015)

In its exploration of the surreal visually, alongside simpler, realist daytime shots of New York City, shows how that line can blur because of something like insomnia. The night shots of the city streets, bathed in different colored traffic or marquee lights, is both visually appealing for the audience and a way to show how Robert De Niro's character, Travis, sees the people who occupy the city.
As a cabbie, Travis sees the seedier versions of people, which, when added to his restlessness, turns him to violence, noble or not.
The lighting is everything I've been told to expect from footage of the 70s, and it serves the movie incredibly well. Colorful, but not too bright, and often even fluorescent, keeps the movie looking more like the sleazy New York that Travis sees, rather than a professional set.
Travis is caught somewhere between the uber-professional and "normal" world of Betsy(Cybill Shepherd)(shown primarily in daytime shots of "normal" buildings and people, and the seedy underbelly occupied by Iris(Jodie Foster)(shown in the nighttime, blurred by colorful lights, deep shadows, and violence). His ties to both are through wanting, he wants to occupy Betsy's world, and he wants to save Iris, so the combination of these two worlds is strange visually. They're tied together by Travis's internal narration.
The filmmaking gets less typical as the movie goes on. As Travis becomes more aggressive, there are scenes like the famous testing of lines in case of confrontation ("You talking' to me?"), clearly chopped together. They really come to a head after a particularly violent point in the movie, seemingly frozen in time.
Taxi Driver creatively and powerfully blurs the night and day to tell the story of an insomniac living within that blurry line. It's good-looking, witty, and aggressive (though it exists somewhere between awake and sleep).