Fourth wall
The fourth wall is the side of a room decoration on a peep-box stage that is open to the audience , so it is only an imaginary wall. It became the central concept in the theory of naturalistic theater towards the end of the 19th century.
Explanation
A fourth wall appears to exist within a stage action because the performers consider it to be present in the game, but do not walk through it and do not interact with the audience . However, an actor can fall out of the role and break through the fourth wall in this way - for example by responding to demonstrations of approval or disapproval from the audience.
history
In the theater of ancient Greece , the characters in the action are often in dialogue with the choir , which occupies a middle position between them and the audience. A sharp distinction between the “here and now” of the performance situation and the action listed is thus fundamentally avoided.
This did not change fundamentally in modern times : In Francis Beaumont's drama The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), for example, three spectators can be heard constantly calling into the scene and demanding changes to the play from the actors, often with ridiculous results. In the Spanish and English theater of the Renaissance as well as in the popular Baroque theater (which was taken up again in the Romantic era by Ludwig Tieck ), different levels of fiction or framework actions are played with, which mix with their internal actions. The demarcation between these levels never seriously becomes a “wall”.
The “ closed drama ” of French classical music avoided such breaks in illusions for the first time, among other things through a clear separation between stage and auditorium. Nevertheless, it remained a habit of actors, especially in entertainment theater, to play to the audience and step out of the action, as in extempore or a-part speaking .
In 1758, Denis Diderot condemned A-part speaking as a widespread bad habit and dishonesty of actors and demanded: “Imagine a large wall at the front edge of the stage that separates you from the ground floor and play as if it were moving Do not move the wall away. ”( Discours sur la poésie dramatique. )
The prerequisite for the modern, naturalistic notion of a fourth wall, which emerged in the 19th century, is a willing belief in something obviously fictional, which the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 called " willful exposure to disbelief ". The common imagination should no longer be just void and ephemeral ( vanitas ). In this way, breaking the agreed illusion becomes a violation of social “frameworks” (in the sense of the sociologist Erving Goffman ).
A “self-forgetfulness” of the authors and actors is accepted or even demanded: The playwright Gerhart Hauptmann explained, for example, that he wrote his play Before Sunrise (1889) “without just thinking about the audience, as if the stage wasn't three but had four walls. ” In 1892, the French playwright and critic Jean Jullien described the fourth wall as a wall that was transparent to the audience and opaque to the actors. The playwrights August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen have also spoken in this direction. Konstantin Sergejewitsch Stanislawski's acting methodology required the actors to be largely independent of audience reactions.
In the course of the criticism of naturalism after 1900, the concept of the impermeable but non-existent fourth wall was often attacked, for example by Wsewolod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht (see alienation effect ). Not least because the fourth wall in the film is much more effective, as the screen is a more impenetrable border than the stage ramp, the theater returned to the possibilities for the actors to interact with the audience. Walter Benjamin explained accordingly that the fourth wall turns a stage action into a “projection”, interpreting naturalistic theater as a forerunner of film.
Breaking through the fourth wall - narrative metaleps
While the fourth wall in the theater is a rather obvious fiction, it is often perceived as an unalterable reality by the reader / viewer / player in a novel , film or computer game .
Technical conventions
A break with conventions is always experienced as the dissolution of the fourth wall, even if these conventions are of a technical nature. This is the case with every virtual reality : When rigid photography becomes “movie”, when silent film becomes sound film or black and white film becomes color film, when the dimension of space is added to the two dimensions of the image, when an unmoved film suddenly appears lets the viewer be influenced like in a computer game - what is shown always seems to become more “realistic” thanks to this perfected technique, to step out of the framework of what is merely presented into reality . Until you get used to the new conventions again.
An increasingly realistic depiction, assuming that everything remains an illusion, is already the goal of the 17th century vanitas still lifes . Vanitas consists in the fact that the fourth wall remains between the viewer and what is represented. The numerous allegories of the five senses on the paintings of that time make it possible that you can almost hear the music of the painted musicians, you can almost smell the smell of the painted food, you can almost feel the softness of the painted fur - but only almost.
Dramaturgical and cinematic conventions
A character in a novel or in a film cannot look at and address their audience personally, as actors on stage would be able to do. It is therefore a particularly effective effect in these media when, for example, a character breaks out of the plot and speaks directly to the viewer who is not visible to them in front of the screen . This trick is mainly used for comical and horror effects. It can also be used as a stylistic device in crime novels, for example when the reader or viewer is asked to help solve the case. The sociologist Erving Goffman called it downkeying ( Frame Analysis , 1974).
It is also a break with conventions when the fictional characters discover that they are only part of a fictional world, as in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo , and then turn to the viewer or break out of their world. Breaking out of an assumed theater role or social role is understood as a break with the fourth wall (cf. emancipation ).
Looking directly into the camera is more similar to theater, as in many soap operas on television, when a scene ends with a wink at the audience. There is also the possibility, instead of an explanatory voice- over, to advance the plot with an explanatory scene in which the viewer is addressed directly, as happens occasionally through the protagonists of Magnum or Malcolm in the middle . In the case of television, other concepts for audience participation in the sense of interactive television are being tried out, which should be spread with digitization. - The fourth wall remains insofar as a public statement can only be meant personally to a limited extent. The personal communication instead of the public one is a common dramaturgical trick to seemingly break through the fourth wall: One example is the main character Jamal in the film Slumdog Millionaire , who chooses the telephone joker in the millionaire game to have a private conversation. The Boston Legal series regularly breaks through the fourth wall. In one episode of the third season, one of the main characters, Denny Crane, even utters the name of the series. The House of Cards series , in which the protagonist Francis Underwood regularly looks directly into the camera and “interacts” with the audience , proceeds in a similarly consistent manner .
In the American series The Model and the Sniffer , it is used in almost every episode. In a scene on the run from an armed killer, the protagonists run out of the set and find themselves in the recording studio. Or in the last episode, Total Lunar Eclipse, the protagonists are told by an employee of the broadcaster that this is the last episode and that the series will be discontinued.
Breaking through the fourth wall can also have a self-deprecating effect and become a constitutive element of the humor of a production. Typical for this is the humor of the sketch series Monty Python's Flying Circus , in which skits are ended without a final punchline, for example, by a colonel (played by Graham Chapman ) appearing and explaining that the sketch is too stupid. In other skits in the series (e.g. the famous Dead Parrot Sketch ), actors slip into their disguises in front of the camera, and the characters address the fact that they only do or say certain things in order to get the sketch out and thus to fill the playing time of the episode. In the Monty Python movie The Knights of the Coconut , the heroes escape a monster in a cartoon scene because the animator dies of a heart attack at the crucial moment and the scene ends abruptly.
A consistent example of the breakthrough of the fourth wall can be seen in the film High Fidelity , in which Rob Gordon, record store owner, tells the story of his life and, above all, his love story - turning directly into the camera in a monologue . The film Kill Bill - Volume 2 shows a black and white scene in the opening credits in which the main character Beatrix Kiddo is driving in an open convertible. She explains, looking directly into the camera, that her revenge is almost done and that she is now on her way to Bill to kill him.
Woody Allen uses breaking through the fourth wall in many of his films: In Boris Gruschenko's Last Night , the title character tells her life story off-screen, and Boris (Allen) looks directly at the viewer several times to comment on what has happened. At the end of the film there is a monologue by Boris which is aimed directly at the viewer. Also , the city € sufferers begins with a letter addressed to the audience monologue Allen; as the film progresses, Alvy Singer (Allen) speaks directly to the viewer (“If only it were like this in life!”). In Whatever Works - Love Yourself Who Can Boris Yellnikoff ( Larry David ) speaks to the cinema audience, which is seen as paranoia by the other characters in the film.
Comic
In the comic , the fourth wall can be broken through in several ways:
- On the one hand, like in the theater, the characters can leave the framework of the plot and address themselves directly to the reader / viewer.
- On the other hand, the elements of the medium themselves can also intervene directly in fictional reality. Possible examples of this are the breaching of the (usually as an imaginary barrier between figures and reader serving) panel or Gutter by
- structuring picture elements,
- the (drawn) hand or person of the draftsman, or
- Reflective materials embedded in the paper of the comic, through which the viewer can find himself in the interior of the plot.
- Examples
- The collapsing panel border of Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze (see picture opposite) falls on its protagonist after his sneezing has brought down the dividing line between comic figure and viewer, the fourth wall , so to speak .
- The cover of issue 31 of the superhero comic The Sensational She-Hulk from September 1991 shows its author John Byrne in a metafictional dialogue with the publisher Renée Witterstaetter, embedded in a fictional plot (the comic figure She-Hulk kidnaps John Byrne, who is casually thrown over her shoulder) . With the boundary between reality and fiction, the fourth wall is lifted in the metaphorical sense.
- The character Deadpool of the Marvel Comics often addresses the reader and provides them with background information, for example. He also mentions authors and draftsmen more often, for example when they are responsible for the death of a character. Once when he hallucinated of Captain America : "Imposter, Ed (McGuinness) killed him! Show the ID! "
- The figure in the comic strip below addresses the reader / viewer directly and breaks through the fourth wall.
- In the comic book Der Ursprung (L'Origine) by the French draftsman Marc-Antoine Mathieu , the protagonist, the Ministerialbeamte Acquefacques, finds sheets of the comic album that tells its own story in the past and future. He encounters the phenomenon of a “ black hole ”, a real breakthrough in a leaf of the comic story. It turns out that the two-dimensional world in which he and his fellow human beings live is only fictional and arises in another, three-dimensional world.
Some of the techniques used in the comic to break through the fourth wall can easily be carried over to the cartoon .
Social importance
In a figurative sense, beyond the theater, the fourth wall describes a bourgeois notion of reality that emerged in the 18th century and which Erving Goffman continued into the 20th century in his works Interaction Ritual (1967) and Frame Analysis (1974). It has often been the subject of sociology .
A fourth wall appears, for example, in situations where what is planned is granted a greater reality than the obvious: the mere observation of accidents or acts of violence in public without intervention gives them something similar to fictitious as theater performances, pictures in newspapers or on monitors and enables them a sensitivity from a distance. In this context, the fourth wall has been described as the “instance of disciplining sight”. The obvious, but unplanned, is thus excluded from a desired world in which order should prevail and which is very vulnerable due to its unreality (cf. Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes ). Augusto Boal , for example, turned against this behavior with his “ Theater of the Oppressed ”.
New media create opportunities to “empathize with the increased distance”, for which the fourth wall is a prerequisite.
literature
- Walter Benjamin : Experiments on Brecht. Edited and with an afterword by Rudolf Tiedemann. 8th edition. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-518-10172-2 .
- Heinz Geiger, Hermann Haarmann: Aspects of the drama. An introduction to theater history and drama analysis. 4th revised and expanded edition. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1996, ISBN 3-531-22147-7 .
- Erving Goffman : Framework Analysis. An attempt on the organization of everyday experiences. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-27929-8 .
- Johannes Friedrich Lehmann: The view through the wall. On the history of the theater audience and the visual in Diderot and Lessing (also Diss. Univ. Freiburg i. Br. 2000). Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 2000, ISBN 3-7930-9233-X .
Individual evidence
- ^ Jean Jullien: Le Théâtre Vivant , Paris 1892, p. 11.
- ↑ See for example Herbert Willems: Theatricalization of Society. Vol. 1: Sociological Theory and Diagnosis of Time , Springer, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-531-14922-6 .
- ↑ Tobias Scholz: Distant compassion. Media images, emotions and solidarity in the face of disasters , Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39646-0 , p. 144.
- ↑ Ulf Otto: Internet appearances: Eine Theatergeschichte der neue Medien, transcript, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-839-42013-3 , p. 255.