Photo: Adrian Susec/Unsplash.
Film buffs, it turns out, are not only creative about making movies, they’re creative about ways to screen movies. That’s because a different locale can lend a whole new feeling to the movie-going experience.
Bryn Stole writes at the New York Times, “Some of international cinema’s biggest names gathered on [a Tuesday in February] at the Berlin International Film Festival as the event honored Martin Scorsese with a lifetime achievement award. Before accepting his trophy, Scorsese listened as the German director Wim Wenders gave a laudatory speech to an audience including celebrities and local dignitaries.
“Just around the corner, parked in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, a group of Berlin’s taxi drivers crammed into the back of a worn-out taxi van to watch a double-feature capped by Scorsese’s 1976 movie Taxi Driver.
“Klaus Meier, who has been driving a cab in Berlin since 1985, handed out bottles of soda and beer, popping the caps with the blade of a pocketknife. Irene Jaxtheimer, who runs a taxi company, passed around homemade popcorn. A generator outside the cab powered a modest television, a DVD player and a small electric heater.
“The unconventional screening, just outside a centerpiece event for one of Europe’s most prestigious film festivals, was part of the makeshift TaxiFilmFest. Running through Sunday, it is partly a protest over the miserable state of the taxi industry these days and partly a counterfestival to celebrate the taxi cab’s iconic place in the urban cultural landscape.
“It’s also in objection to an exclusive partnership deal between the festival, known locally as the Berlinale, and the ride-hailing giant Uber to ferry filmmakers between the city’s movie theaters during the event. … Beeping horns from the busy street outside — some of them coming from sleek black Uber vehicles emblazoned with the Berlinale logo — blended with the street scenes from Taxi Driver playing on the tinny television speakers. ‘Ah, I really miss those mechanical fare boxes!’ Meier said as the fares ticked away in the onscreen cab of the movie’s unhinged antihero, Travis Bickle, who drives around mid-’70s New York with growing hatred and menace.
“The back-seat festival is showing only taxi-themed flicks, and the potential repertoire is deep. Meier polled friends and fellow taxi drivers about which films to show, and said he had received dozens of suggestions about movies in which a cab plays a starring role.
“The early feature on Tuesday was Barry Greenwald’s 1982 quirky slice-of-life documentary Taxi! about some odd characters driving cabs in Toronto. The previous evening, a small rotating crowd beat the rain to catch portions of the 1998 French action-comedy Taxi, a lighthearted flick from the director Gérard Pirès about sinister, Mercedes-driving German gangsters, hapless Marseilles cops and a lead-footed rookie cabdriver who turns out to be the only person fast enough to catch the criminals.
“An early hit at the TaxiFilmFestival, which kicked off last Thursday, was Under the Bombs, a Lebanese drama set during the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. In the movie, a Beirut taxi driver is hired to drive a woman into the war-torn south of Lebanon in hopes of finding her sister and son. Meier described it as ‘Shakespearean’ and ‘a masterpiece,’ and Berndt said it was clearly the ‘most moving taxi film’ he’d ever seen.
“But the clear favorite among attendees was Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, a quirky, episodic 1991 film about taxi drivers and passengers in five cities around the world. The selection for TaxiFilmFest’s Sunday night finale had yet to be chosen, and Meier said he remained open to suggestions. …
“The festival attendees, squeezed into the back of the van on Tuesday, also reminisced about better days for taxi driving, such as ferrying around American and British soldiers from the occupying Allies stationed in West Berlin. (The French troops, the small crowd agreed, had less cash and rarely hailed cabs.) …
“The days before the fall of the Berlin Wall were ‘blissful times, hard to even imagine anymore,’ said Stephan Berndt.” More at the Times, here.
See also my 2014 post about a theatrical production in a taxi in Iran, here.
By the way, I hated the movie Taxi Driver when I saw it around 1976 — and walked out. Still don’t get what’s to like. You?
TaxiFilmFestival! That’s a cool idea. Night on Earth is hilarious. I’m not sure I’ve seen the Taxi Driver movie.
It was dark. And it was the first appearance of Jodie Foster–as a teenage prostitute.