What was cinema’s first fourth wall break?
A fourth-wall break in a movie can sometimes be devilishly clever, like that moment in Funny Games when Paul turns and looks at the camera, pulling us into his twisted world of torment, or when Antoine turns round at the end of The 400 Blows and looks into the lens, establishing a freeze-frame immortalising his innocence and desire for freedom.
However, breaking the fourth wall doesn’t always mean looking at the camera or talking to the audience, with filmmakers doing so in innovative ways by drawing the viewer’s attention to the artificiality of cinema, the very malleability of the medium. A great example of this occurs in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, when the celluloid seems to break down, with the filmmaker appearing to highlight that what we’re watching is intricately composed, images selected and rearranged to tell a story, others hidden and instead merely told not shown.
When characters do decide to talk directly to the camera, though, it can be hit or miss, either mastering the perfect level of self-awareness or falling straight into the realm of cringe-inducing messiness, for which we can compare Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with Deadpool and close the case.
So while the technique is something we tend to associate with modern cinema, it pre-dates the movies, with its origins actually found in the theatre. Naturally, then, it didn’t take long for filmmakers to utilise the technique when cinema became an increasingly dominant art form, and while it’s hard to pinpoint the first ever use of a fourth wall break, certain scholars argue that this title goes to the man who shoots his gun at the camera in The Great Train Robbery.
Others identify it as Men Who Have Made Love to Me from 1918, a film in which feminist writer Mary MacLane describes her various love affairs with different men, telling her stories of amorous encounters, terrible men, and exhilarating flings to the camera. Of course, she’s not speaking directly to us because this was before cinema had sound, but she actively acknowledges the audience, which was indeed a first.
Sadly, little is known about the movie directed by Arthur Berthelet, besides a few stills, because it was unfortunately lost, with the film taking its content from MacLane’s own writings, specifically those contained in I, Mary MacLane.
It was rather boundary-pushing for the time when women couldn’t even vote in the US, but it also pushed the boundaries of the cinematic medium, opening up a world where it could be interactive and playful beyond merely capturing images.
Advertised as a film featuring “the most talked of woman today”, the poster boasted a story that “bares her very soul”. MacLane was a true revolutionary for the period, openly bisexual as well as staunchly feminist in her views, showing the world a woman who wasn’t going to shy away from her own sexuality, even if society deemed such behaviour shocking and taboo.
She brought this controversy to Men Who Have Made Love to Me, breaking down the fourth wall to address the audience with such a scandal. It was the only way she could truly get her stories of romantic affairs across, such that no one could ignore her modern vision of femininity and sexuality if she was looking them right in the eye.
