Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Taxi Driver
2017 · Jang Hoon · A Taxi Driver on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the color shift as the taxi drives south toward Gwangju. (light)
The Seoul scenes are bright and crowded, but as the cab heads south the palette cools and the compositions tighten around checkpoints and barricades.
Payoff: The film changes temperature before anyone says a word about what's waiting ahead.
Listen for the calm radio voice describing an ordinary, peaceful day. (sound)
State broadcasts report normalcy on the soundtrack while the images on screen show something else entirely, the announcer's calm never matching what you can see.
Payoff: The gap between what the radio says and what you're watching is the film's whole argument about the state.
Watch how much of the film happens inside the taxi. (staging)
Most of the drama between Man-seob and Hinzpeter unfolds in the cramped space of the cab itself, a small stage where trust and distance both have to be worked out.
Payoff: Two men who barely share a language build their whole relationship in the space of a front seat.
Watch Man-seob's face for how slowly his grin disappears. (performance)
Song Kang-ho plays the character's shift from comic hustler to something graver through accumulation, not through any single moment of obvious change.
Payoff: This is what the reading calls the action-image: his early scenes are pure hustle, perception snapping straight into action, problem to payoff. In the reading: action-image. Deleuze calls this the action-image: a character perceives a situation and acts on it at once, no hesitation between seeing and doing.
Notice the close, handheld camera during the crowd scenes. (camera)
Cinematographer Ko Nak-seon shoots the crackdown with compressed lenses and close, disorienting framing, denying you any wide, reassuring overview of what's happening.
Payoff: You're kept as disoriented as the people caught in the crowd, instead of watching from safety above it.
Once you have seen it
Watch the drive back, alone, in early morning light. (structure)
After fleeing, Man-seob turns the taxi around and drives south again through empty, quiet countryside, the landscape giving no external reason for what he's decided.
Payoff: His perception and his action reconnect in that single turn, now founded on what he has already seen rather than on money.
Notice how many checkpoints the taxi has to talk its way through. (structure)
On the return trip the film shifts almost into a chase picture, with the cab and its passengers negotiating military checkpoints one after another.
Payoff: The witnessing that began the film has to be smuggled back out the same way information itself was suppressed.
Notice the film is dedicated to a driver history nearly lost. (structure)
The real taxi driver Hinzpeter searched for was unidentified for decades and had already died before the film's success led his family to come forward.
Payoff: This is what the reading calls people-are-missing: a community assembled out of testimony, gathered around someone who isn't there to claim it. In the reading: people-are-missing. Deleuze's phrase is that the people are missing: a film calls a community into being around an absence rather than reporting on one already there.
Carry this in: Watch the windshield, not just Man-seob. Notice the exact moment the joking in his face stops.