They’re Watching You

In early cinema, actors kept a wary eye on the camera. Georges Melies performs magic tricks for us, bowing courteously. From his first appearance in tramp drag, Chaplin flirted with or scowled at the lens, reaching through it to seduce his worshippers out there in the dark.

But watch the next fifty years of cinema and you can sense a wall being erected, brick by brick, between actor and camera. It may be invisible from our side, so we can still see the players cavort, but it is obviously all too opaque from their side of the limelight. They no longer seem aware of us. Even Chaplin can manage only glances, shot through the spectral mortar, finding chinks in the conceptual masonry cutting us off forever from the gods on the screen.

(When Buster Keaton walks into a movie screen in Sherlock Jr., becoming part of the celluloid action, the first scene greeting him, naturally enough, is a stone wall.)

Monsieur Verdoux perhaps contains Chaplin’s last eye contact with his fan base: as the serial killer addresses the court, he laughs off his impending execution and observes, “I will see you all very soon… very soon.” As his gaze sweeps the room, does it alight, momentarily, upon us?

It is still possible, of course, for actors to address the camera, and related branches of showbiz like the TV news strive to normalize the practice, but while random passers-by in a Feuillade movie could look our way as if to say “Can you believe this?” or “Me again!”, any such interactions now register as violations of some kind of understood norm. Acceptable as a gimmick, but not to be tolerated in any quantity.

Who built the fourth wall? Audiences, filmmakers, actors or the characters they play? In Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, a sex worker performs behind a sheet of one-way glass, on display to the punters but shielded from seeing them. She couldn’t do what she does, she explains, if she had to look at her audience.

by David Cairns