A ‘Taxi Driver’ Remake: Why Arthur Jafa Recast the Scorsese Ending
Aruna D’Souza www.nytimes.com aruna-d-souza
The artist has gone back to his filmmaking roots, re-examining what he sees as racial undertones in Martin Scorsese’s classic 1976 movie.
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Call it a return to his roots. The 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 garnering art world fame, including a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, for “The White Album,” created from original and collaged video footage. Jafa’s practice has embraced film and video, sculpture, installation, and even painting.

His newest film, which went on view Thursday at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, has a provocative conceit: Jafa has remade the shockingly violent climax of a classic of American cinema — Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976) — in which the main character Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, storms into a seedy East Village brothel and kills everyone in sight in order to save Iris, a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster, then 12 years old.