Breaking The Fourth Wall

Just watching Pirates Of The Caribbean and the scene where Sparrow is tied to that post and has fruit chucked at him... and he looks directly into the camera...


It got me thinking... name other movies with similar scenes... I can only think of a handful myself:

• That scene in POTC
• Jumanji, when the kid goes to get an axe from the shed, but it's locked... so he picks up an axe to try to break the shed door down
• Ferris Bueller constantly talking to the camera/audience. Ok, this one is borderline when it comes to a quick scene as it's basically the whole film

__________________

I actually had made a list of films that broke the fourth wall recently. Some on it were:-
Black Sabbath
Nights of Cabiria
Taste of Cherry
THe Holy Mountain
THe Great Train Robbery & Goodfellas (use the same shot)
Wayne's World

THere are actually loads more than you would think. Even the likes of Psycho, has that ending.

__________________
Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

The Muppets do it constantly in every film.

Funny Games.

Both Norton and Pitt talk to the camera or give it knowing looks in Fight Club.

Spaceballs-"What's happening now is happening now."

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang-Downey talks to the camera at the end, I think? It's been a while since I've seen that one...

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back-The title characters and Ben Affleck crack an inside joke and stare knowingly into the camera.

I'm pretty sure Woody Allen has done it in a few movies. Sleeper maybe? Annie Hall.

There's lots out there.

__________________

Ingmar Bergman too. And yeah bb, Annie Hall probably has the best example. Also, Mel Brooks was fond of it too.

Groucho does it a lot.

__________________
5-time MoFo Award winner.

Amarcord

__________________

The Muppet Movie and Prospero's Books are my favorite fourth-wall-breaking films.

Besides the ones people have mentioned already...

-Buster Keaton in The High Sign. I'm sure he did it elsewhere too but that's the one that jumps into my mind right now.
-W.C. Fields in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break ("This scene originally took place in a bar but we couldn't get it past the censors" - I imagine this was a long-lived and common device in stage comedy as well. After all, the coinage comes from the conventional 3-walls-and-a-proscenium stage designs of most theaters.)
-Going back to John Hughes films, I know it happens in Home Alone 2 because I watched it recently, might happen in the first one and as well.
-Kuffs (bleh).
-Tons of Warner Brothers Cartoons. Bugs Bunny does it constantly. Even Tiny Toon Adventures uses it.
-Speaking of children's tv shows, Clarissa Explains it All is an obvious one from my youth.
-it's also worth pointing out that speaking to the camera is the norm for most non-narrative shows on tv (the News, for example). Often in narratives it's used to acknowledge something formulaic in the story. It's acknowledging that it's fiction. In tv news it's more about denoting what you're seeing as "real". I would argue that it's connected because there's always something paradoxical and ambiguous in the technique when it's used to denote a fiction (cf. the "liars paradox").

__________________
"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

The doors

LETS GET SOME TACOS

Kilmer looks right into the camera

Here's one of my favorites

__________________
Under-the-radar Movie Awesomeness.
http://earlsmoviepicks.blogspot.com/

Is there a difference between addressing the audience and looking directly at the camera (and giving a knowing look or acknowledging it in some other way, of course)? It could just be me being pedantic (no, really) but when I think of breaking the fourth wall, I think about actors/actresses addressing the audience, much like Groucho or various characters in Shakespeare.

I was more on about the simple look to the camera/audience.


I mentioned Ferris Bueller in my OP but I was really more about that one look.
The simple quick scene that acknowledges the audience amongst all the events.

put this at 1:17 ! Best way to break the fourth wall !

__________________
''Haters are my favourite. I've built an empire with the bricks they've thrown at me... Keep On Hating''
- CM Punk
http://threemanbooth.files.wordpress...unkshrug02.gif

It's possible to look directly at the camera and not break the fourth wall.

Like.. lets say someone is hiding from a killer. Peeping out from a crack.
We get a POV shot, the killer is looking around, suddenly he turns and stares right into the camera!

It's not breaking the forth wall, because at that moment we are in a POV relationship with another character.

You can do a LOT with just a look.
Sometimes a look is breaking the forth wall, sometimes it's not, depends on how it's used.

This is part of why I asked. There's a difference between acknowleding the camera and looking at it. But I wondered whether, in other people minds, there was a difference between addressing the camera and acknowledging it when it comes to breaking the fourth wall?

I don't think the character has to address the audience verbally, do they? That sounds way too picky to me. I thought of the Trading Places one earlier today and, without words, Murphy is addressing the camera in one of the most brilliant instances of breaking the fourth wall. Obviously POV shots aren't the same thing. Breaking the fourth wall is simply acknowledging the audience exists.

I forgot about The Wolf of Wall Street. It's sort of all over the place with voice over and breaking the wall. It uses pretty much every trick in the film making storytelling book.

Not sure about this one, essentially Karloff is being a narrator and presenter in the bookend scenes. It would be impossible for his part to work without addressing the audience directly.

If we count this, then most films with voice-overs would also have to be included.

__________________
@MondoEsoterica - an insight into my world of seriously obscure cinema.

In yet another John Hughes movie, 16 Candles, Anthony Michael Hall is "babysitting" the jock's drunk girlfriend and while sitting in said jock's car with girl, she slumps over face-first onto his crotch. Hall looks right at the camera and says, "This is getting good."

In, um, another Hughes (written) flick, Pretty in Pink, near the end of the movie, the character Duckie (Jon Cryer) is feeling a bit down at the prom after giving up his love to another guy. He then sees a gorgeous gal looking at him, points to himself as if to say, "Who, me?" She nods in agreement, and Duckie looks right at the camera, obviously happy and conveying it to the audience directly.

__________________
"Miss Jean Louise, Mr. Arthur Radley."

Sorry, I should have specified, at the very end of the film, it shows him on the mechanical horse and the film crew is shown. That is breaking the fourth wall or metareferencing or whatever you like to call it.

Can't believe no one mentioned Ferris Bueller's Day's Off...Matthew Broderick talks directly to the camera for the first five minutes of the movie. Mel Brooks breaks the fourth wall in just about every movie he's made at some point.