Now comes
***** at Gladstone Gallery, an appropriation of a different sort. Viewers can readily identify its source: the penultimate scene from Martin Scorsese’s 1977 film,
Taxi Driver. Beginning with the sociopathic protagonist’s murder of Sport, the man who pimps out Jodie Foster’s teenage prostitute, Jafa shows us Robert DeNiro’s Travis Bickle, but Sport, played by Harvey Keitel in the film, is now Scar, a Black actor (Jerrel O’Neal) who speaks Sport’s lines and makes the same moves. Black actors also fill the roles of the other men killed in the bloodbath; ditto the police who come into the room, guns drawn.
The scene, including its famous overhead shot and long tracking shot through the hallways and into the street, repeats and repeats, from different starting points and cut to different rhythms, throughout the nearly 75 minutes of Jafa’s film. After several repetitions, some opening-night viewers left the Gladstone's 21st Street space, thinking they had seen the whole loop. They hadn’t. Jafa inserted one take where Bickle kills himself, and gave Scar two hummed monologues taken from song lyrics and poems he talk-sings to, including
As, the hit from Stevie Wonder’s 1977 album,
Songs in the Key of Life.
In two shows in New York, at 52 Walker and Gladstone, Jafa gets to the dark side of Black life
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