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Watching you, watching me:
breaking cinema’s 4th wall
Realism ... a style, a genre or a state of mind? Mark Ramey unpicks this complex concept through investigating the anti-realist technique of breaking the 4th wall.
‘Cinematic realism’ is a complicated can of
worms: open it and before long, you are, like Neo in The Matrix, wondering about the very nature of reality itself, let alone the reality you see represented on screen. Such deep philosophical musings are best left to students on university courses and action heroes in SF dystopias. But a student of A Level Film should nevertheless know how to use ‘realism’ as a term of analysis, and appreciate its radical character. Simply put, ‘reality’ is a battle ground
where we find, amongst others, the following combatants: Soviet revolutionary realists; French poetic realists; Italian neo-realists; British social realists; surrealists and of course documentarists in all their forms. Aside from such manifestations of ‘the real’ students need to recognise the realist style of classical Hollywood in comparison to the more avant-garde work explored by such film radicals as the French Nouvelle Vague and Scandinavian Dogme movement. Finally throughout an A Level course there is reference to theoretical interpretations of film such as psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism and postmodernism. These different theories see
both the act of spectatorship and the political, ideological messages displayed on screen as representing profoundly different realities. As I said earlier, it’s a can of worms. This article, however, aims to introduce
‘realism’ by the somewhat less difficult route of stating what it isn’t, rather than what it is. The most obvious starting point then is to draw attention to what are often called ‘anti-realist’ film devices and techniques. These techniques engage us precisely because they challenge our understanding of what is real: collectively their effect is known as ‘breaking the fourth wall’.
The 4th wall So what is ‘the fourth wall’? It is a term that
derives from theatre and it represents the invisible wall that separates an audience from a performance. It is the invisible wall that allows the audience safely to observe stage/screen events without becoming part of those events. It is in effect a distancing device. Without that distance we literally become involved in the narrative space of the art work. ‘The fourth wall’ thus allows audiences to engage in the ‘illusion of realism’. We suspend our disbelief and allow ourselves to become immersed in another world, another space and time, a separate narrative universe. ‘Breaking the fourth wall’ is therefore the act that reminds an audience that they are watching a performance. It is like roughly waking from a lucid dream only to realise that it was all a delicate fantasy.
Wall-breaking Accidents can happen: the camera crew can
come into shot (perhaps reflected in a window or mirror); water droplets and sun-bursts can fall on camera lenses; microphone booms can suddenly drop into the top of a frame; sets can wobble and with location shooting the public can stop to watch. Continuity errors, the beloved preserve of every film obsessive, are also classic examples of the fourth wall crumbling. But none of these examples are intentional and so not truly anti-realist. It is the conscious desire to destroy realism that interests us. An accidental breaking of the fourth wall is trivial in comparison to its intentional use by an artist.
Extra-diegetic exempla The most obvious instance of ‘breaking the
fourth wall’ is when an onscreen character suddenly connects directly with the audience either through their gaze and/or their dialogue: the technical term for such an event is ‘extra- diegetic’. So what examples are there? Curiously enough they start appearing at the very dawn of cinema. In one of the first Lumiere films of 1895,
Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (a 46-second reel depicting exactly that) we see the workers clearly looking at the cameraman, doffing their hats and play acting. The first narrative Western, The Great Train Robbery of 1903 by E. S. Porter, features a bandit shooting directly into the camera (and so the audience)
english and media centre | December 2009 | MediaMagazine 27
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