Taxi Driver sound effects remixed into a mini-symphony of urban despair

By Joe Blevins | September 15, 2015 | 5:30pm

Aux Features Film

Someday, a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets. Until that day, however, alienated loners and cinema buffs alike can enjoy “The Sounds Of Taxi Driver,” a striking new video by director and editor Pablo Fernández Eyre, whose eclectic resume includes The Best Damn Sports Show Period and something called 2012 Hooters Dream Girl. The newly-minted montage combines ultra-brief clips and sound effects from the classic 1976 Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro joint into a single, intense minute brimming with violence, loneliness, paranoia, and alienation. Though Taxi Driver was memorably scored by Bernard Herrmann and was, in fact, the great composer’s final film, Fernández Eyre’s soundtrack employs some earlier Herrmann music, specifically the eerie, whistling theme from the 1968 shocker Twisted Nerve. “The Sounds Of Taxi Driver,” as its title suggests, takes the Twisted Nerve music and augments it with actual sound effects from the Scorsese film: car horns, squealing brakes, fizzing Alka-Seltzers, and the ever-present clicking of the cab meter, which ultimately creates the effect of a ticking time bomb.

Scraps of dialogue are also heard throughout the video, including that one really famous line, but divorced from their original context, they are reduced to much more noise. Interestingly, the fragmented, non-linear nature of “The Sounds Of Taxi Driver” appropriately mimics what must be going on in the muddled mind of cabbie-turned-vigilante Travis Bickle throughout the film. It’s just this relentless assault of faces and voices and ugly neon lights, strung together in a collage of urban misery, 1970s New York style. The montage serves as a further reminder of the skills of cinematographer Michael Chapman, who has succeeded mightily in making the Big Apple look like hell on earth, the place where hopes and dreams come to die in the grungiest-looking hallways ever. In all, this is a crackerjack bit of film editing. Viewers interested in further exploring the oeuvre of Pablo Fernández Eyre can do so at the filmmaker’s personal website.