A Taxi Driver · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A Taxi Driver builds its ethical argument on the premise that the gaze — the sustained, unflinching act of looking — is never neutral: it incriminates the looker, transforming witness into responsibility. Jang Hoon anchors this in a remarkable historical fact: Jürgen Hinzpeter's video footage of the Gwangju massacre actually existed, evidence that survived the state's suppression for years. When Man-seob, whose horizon extends no further than tomorrow's fare, finally sees soldiers beating students in the street, the taxi becomes a moving viewing platform; his unwilling moral education is structured as the audience's own. The film reinforces this with a formal shift into vérité / direct cinema: the Seoul-set opening is bright and crowded, rendered in an almost screwball register suited to Man-seob's hustling comic mode, but as the cab moves south the visual temperature cools, contrast tightens, and the camera destabilizes into the handheld immediacy that Jang Hoon inherits directly from Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers — the shaky, close, immediate image operating as an epistemological claim that what we are seeing is recorded fact rather than dramatized reconstruction. Against both of these registers, the film deploys genre with characteristic Korean commercial cunning: road movie shades into witness drama and then, in the final third, into a military-checkpoint chase that redirects genre adrenaline toward political stakes — the urgency no longer abstract but measured by the footage sitting in the backseat, which must reach the world before the soldiers do.