Word: camera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Populating this world are memorable characters, played by an excellent cast. Robert De Niro's Travis by turns charms, mesmerizes and shocks the viewer. His performance includes the now-famous monologue to the camera ("Are you talkin' to me?"), said to have been improvised. A young Jodie Foster contributes a jarring, Academy Award-winning performance as a young prostitute: one moment she is undoing a belt buckle in businesslike manner, at another she is giggly and talkative while eating a piece of bread slathered in sweetness. Harvey Keitel is the epitome of the slimy pimp--he claimed to have rehearsed...
...illustrate the under-world of Travis's mind and daily life, Scorsese relies on these fine performances by the well-chosen cast, as well as striking camera techniques that might seem bizarre or affected if they didn't match exactly the disturbing paths of Travis's dead-end thoughts...
Thereafter, the camera work serves to highlight both the flesh-for-money world Travis lives in and the pathetic madness of the cabbie himself. Several overhead shots of tables as hands exchange money and purchases emphasize the vacuum of this world. At several points, the camera speed is subtly slowed down, as when Travis sweeps his hand over a table in the campaign office with Betsy, making the scene even more hypnotic without our realizing...
What will hit the stores in April is an interesting but not quite revolutionary product line. The cameras are lighter and smaller. They print such things as date and location on the back of each picture, not the front, so family fun shots don't look as if they were caught by airport security cameras. Film loading is simplified (drop in a cartridge, shut the camera, the film threads itself), and a button allows you to switch among three image sizes (standard, wider, panorama)--but these are only modest advances over today's models...
...real changes come with developing. Magnetic codes on the film will instruct photo-processing equipment to correct for errors like insufficient light and will automatically record camera settings. Instead of messy negatives, you get back the tidy little film cartridge--negatives inside--plus a sheet of thumbnail prints to use as a guide for duplicates...