Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema
Breaking the Fourth Wall is the first book to provide a broad understanding of the
role of direct address within fiction cinema. Chapters on the role of direct address in
Hollywood comedies and musicals, as well as in some 'alternative' film practices, are
accompanied by extended readings of individual films in which the illusion of eye
contact between spectator and character offers a rich metaphor for the problems
of vision (insight, foresight, other kinds of perceptiveness) that are so often the
currency of movie narratives.