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his dead ally, Joe Pesci’s psychotic gangster, towering over us (and him – perhaps it is a memory or a dream) with a gun pointed into all of our cinematic hearts; the rounds Pesci fires literally and metaphorically destroy the genre, its audience and its main protagonist. However, for the sake of brevity we will now
focus on the genre most commonly associated with the act of breaking the fourth wall: comedy.
The 4th wall of humour Early attempts at direct audience address or
and it could be used at the projectionist’s discretion at the beginning or end of the film to either shock or unsettle respectively. More recently we find Clockwork Orange
starting with Alex staring unblinkingly at us the audience, as the camera then tracks slowly away from this troubled and troubling young thug. Conversely Psycho ends with an unsettling track in to Norman Bates’ eyes, whose piercing stare is chilling.
Gangsters’ gazes The extra-diegetic gaze (a character gazing at the audience) also has the ability to shock
when it is used in traditionally realist genres. The gangster genre is renowned for its social realism (its accurate depiction of working-class reality) so when the fourth wall crumbles as in the beginning of Gangster No 1 or, more famously, in the final sequence of Once Upon a Time in America, the effect is startling. Likewise, in the final two scenes of Scorsese’s Goodfellas we first see Ray Liotta’s character gazing forlornly at us, the audience, as we all realise that he has ceased living the exciting life of a high-rolling hood and is now living in dull suburban obscurity under a witness protection scheme. The final scene is then even more poignant as we see
extra-diegesis can be found in numerous early comic masters from both the golden age of silent comedy and the early ‘talkies’. In most Laurel and Hardy films we are invited to identify with Oliver Hardy’s resignation and despair as Laurel once again messes up at his expense – the extra-diegetic gaze of Hardy is here particularly poignant. Similarly their contemporary, Groucho Marx, was making witty asides to the audience a feature of much of the Marx Brothers’ film work. The comedy derives from our sense of being directly involved in the moment through the performer’s extra-diegetic gaze and dialogue. In The Big Store he tells the audience that a dress is red although the black and white film cannot show it because, ‘Technicolor is so expensive.’ More recently films like Alfie or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off have used audience address to drive the narrative – rather like an intimate confessional between the performer and the audience. Comedy delights in reminding us of the fourth-
wall’s presence because we laugh both at the irony of our situation and the film-maker’s wit. Examples are numerous. All the Austin Powers films subvert any pretence of realism with Austin frequently addressing the camera. Woody Allen in his early films frequently talks to the camera,
28 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre
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