Call it a return to your roots. Artist Arthur Jafa began his career as a cinematographer, working with his then-wife, Julie Dash, on the acclaimed “Daughters of the Dust” (1991) and with Spike Lee on “Crooklyn” (1994), before rising to fame. art world. , including a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, for “The White Album,” created from original and collaged video footage. Jafa's practice has spanned film and video, sculpture, installation and even painting.
His latest film, which screened Thursday at Chelsea's Gladstone Gallery, has a provocative idea: Jafa has remade the shockingly violent climax of an American film classic, Martin Scorsese's “Taxi Driver” (1976), in the that the main character, Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, breaks into a seedy East Village brothel and kills everyone he sees to save Iris, a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster, who was 12 at the time.
In the original film, what Jafa calls the “redacted version,” these characters, including Iris’ pimp Sport (played by Harvey Keitel), were white. That never seemed right to Jafa. When she discovered that the film's famous screenwriter, Paul Schrader, had wanted Sport to be African-American, he decided to “restore” the film by introducing black actors, except for De Niro and Foster. In the 73-minute-long film, titled “******” – or as the artist pronounces it, “Redacted” – we see this cropped version of the bloody climax over and over again, each time slightly but crucially different. The result is extraordinary (both technically and conceptually) and brings to the surface the racist animus long accepted as the basis of Bickle's barely contained rage. (Quentin Tarantino He also criticized the decision to change the character to white in his 2022 book, “Cinema Speculation”).
Schrader, who is I still make movies At 77 years old, he said in a recent telephone conversation that the change to his original vision was the right decision. “Someone at Columbia Pictures told Marty, 'We're going to have a big splash at the movies if we cast Sport as Black,' and I realized they were absolutely right.”
“I think it would have been a much more vile and disgusting film if its hatred was directed exclusively at people of color,” he added. “You can't make something so out of the ordinary that you can't see it or that people just can't stand to look at.” (Martin Scorsese did not respond to several calls seeking comment from him.)
Jafa will also debut another installation, the deliberately misspelled “Black Power Tool and Die Trynig,” at 52 Walker in TriBeCa this week. It will include paintings, sculptures and a film titled “LOML” (2022/24), a tribute to musician and cultural critic Greg Tate, who died in 2021 (its title is an acronym for “love of my life,” the two were dear friends. ) He took a break from installing the two programs to talk about “******”. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Why “Taxi Driver” and why now?
It's literally an idea from 30 years ago. I saw “Taxi Driver” when I was a senior in high school, and in many ways it crossed my mind. I remember watching it and being mesmerized by the making of the film, but also very disturbed by it. I knew something was wrong about it. But I didn't really know what kind of cinematic worldview I was trying to express.
And what is that context, as you understand it now?
It was a remake of “The Searchers” on the one hand [a 1956 film starring John Wayne about a man who saves a young white woman who has been kidnapped by Native Americans]. And it was a response to two things that happened in the '70s: the impact of foreign films on Hollywood and blaxploitation.
Blaxploitation saved Hollywood in the late '60s. We had the sexual revolution, feminism, and the whole civil rights movement happening in the streets, but Hollywood was making these movies that seemed almost intentionally to deny the major cultural changes that were happening. . Then suddenly you hear “Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.”“ [1971] and “Axis” [1971] and “Superfly” [1972] and after that it's a tidal wave: the studios had been struggling and these movies were attracting audiences.
But at the same time, to be frank, they were also occupying a space that until then had been reserved for white men. Resources, but also a lot of psychological space. You hadn't seen many direct, no-holds-barred representations of black men in Hollywood up until that point.
Do you read “Taxi Driver” in part as Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader's answer to blaxploitation films?
Yes. When you say that Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and then George Lucas and Steven Spielberg saved Hollywood, in a way, they actually saved Hollywood for white men.
There are almost no black people in “Taxi Driver.”
There's something a little perverse about the way blackness is there and not in “Taxi Driver.” There aren't many depictions of black pimps in 1960s American cinema: pimps had too much agency for white people to want to make movies about them. But then a movie comes along that shows this pimp character…and he's white. He threw you off a bit, even though the rest of the movie reflects the spirit of Travis, who seems clearly racist.
When I read that Paul Schrader had originally conceived the Sport character as black, a light bulb went off and I said, “Wow, it would be cool to replace the white characters with the black characters they had in mind.” But at the time it was really just a fantasy; It was nothing I thought was technically possible.
What changed?
I was starting to see all the face replacement effects on Instagram and it made me wonder if I could finally make this idea a reality. But none of the existing consumer programs would work. So we had to re-cut all the takes where we replaced the actors. It was a very complex technical exercise. We tried to replicate the optics, the angle, the distance from the subject to the focal lens, the actual lenses, this kind of thing, so that it would fit into place smoothly.
But you can't just introduce the new piece, because as soon as you introduce black people, black men in particular, it just doesn't work the same way. For example, with the night manager, we had planned to use the original sound, but it's so incongruous to hear this Italian voice coming from a black guy, so we replaced that audio.
In his movie, Travis Bickle ends up looking like Dylann ceiling, the white supremacist who entered a black church in Charleston in 2015 and killed nine parishioners. You used footage of Roof in your previous film, “The White Album” which won a prize at the Venice Biennale.
My Travis Bickle is Dylann Roof. I think he was always Dylann Roof. He just got muddy [in the original] because Scorcese and Schrader made him kill these white people.
You include a scene in which the pimp sings “As” by Stevie Wonder, from his album “Songs in the Key of Life” that came out in 1976, the same year as “Taxi Driver.”
That album was really like the soundtrack of Black America when it came out: preachers, pimps, and everyone was listening to it. The idea that this pimp would be standing and humming a Stevie Wonder tune is accurate, but in a way it's an alternate reality. I don't think it would have changed the world if the pimp had remained black, but I think it would have come about in a completely different way if the “Dylann Roof moment” had been seen as it really was.
You introduce another scene that doesn't appear in the original film, in which the pimp (whom you renamed “Scar” in reference to a character from “The Searchers”) delivers a monologue, or perhaps a soliloquy.
I think my pimp character is a lot more like the pimps I knew or saw. Having Scar listen to Stevie Wonder (I hate to say it) humanizes a type of person that most people have a very limited understanding of.
I always insist that white people have no idea what goes on in black people's heads. But when Scar talks, he quotes Du Bois, he quotes Samuel Delaney's “Dog in the Fisherman's Net,” there are all kinds of other things floating around in his head.
What do you think of one of the earlier scenes in the film, in which Scorsese himself plays the passenger in Travis Bickle's taxi, and says some pretty offensive things about black people, and definitely makes clear the world in which Bickle operates.
I thought the character he played was nominally racist. Which means he was contextually driven. Scorsese playing the role was one of the boldest things in the film. As if he knew that the character's unapologetic vitriol had to be explicit and not undermined by the actor's need to be liked. So he took it upon himself to achieve the necessary performance.
What do you think is the end result of making this remix?
My brother said, “Rewire your brain a little bit. It's going to be hard to watch 'Taxi Driver' again without thinking, 'What we got back then was the redacted version.'” And this may not be an unredacted version, but I think it's definitely been restored to something closer to the way it was conceived.
So, in your opinion, is “Taxi Driver” a racist movie?
I know there is an argument, is this a movie about a racist or a racist movie? Racism is only part of the paradigm and the structure will lead you to it. Unless you're very consciously trying to counter those tropes, you'll inevitably find yourself in that place.
With “******”, it is as if you are polishing a problematic artifact. Part of black people's (perhaps waning) superpower is our ability to see things as they are, not self-imposed denial. I'm watching “Taxi Driver” as it is.
