Fourth wall
The fourth wall is the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.[1][2] The idea of the fourth wall was made explicit by Denis Diderot and spread in nineteenth-century theatre with the advent of theatrical realism,[3] which extended the idea to the imaginary boundary between any fictional work and its audience.
The presence of the fourth wall is an established convention of modern realistic theatre, which has led some artists to draw direct attention to it for dramatic or comedic effect when this boundary is "broken", for example by an actor onstage speaking to the audience directly. The best example of this are provided in many of the short films of Laurel and Hardy, when a befuddled Oliver Hardy would look directly at the audience to share in his frustration over some matter involving his partner, Stan Laurel. Decades later, Alan Hale Jr. would derive the same effect for similar exasperating situations involving his television sidekick, Bob Denver in Gilligan's Island.
The acceptance of the transparency of the fourth wall is part of the suspension of disbelief between a fictional work and an audience, allowing them to enjoy the fiction as if they were observing real events.[2] Although the critic Vincent Canby described it in 1987 as "that invisible screen that forever separates the audience from the stage,"[4] postmodern art forms frequently either do away with it entirely, or make use of various framing devices to manipulate it in order to emphasize or de-emphasize certain aspects of the production, according to the artistic desires of the work's creator.
When speaking directly to the audience through the camera in a film or television program, it is called "breaking the fourth wall."[1][5]
Fifth wall
The term "fifth wall" has been used as an extension of the fourth wall concept to refer to the "invisible wall between critics or readers and theatre practitioners."[6] This conception led to a series of workshops at the Globe Theatre in 2004 designed to help break the fifth wall.[7] The term has also been used to refer to "that semi-porous membrane that stands between individual audience members during a shared experience".[8] In media, the television set has been described metaphorically as a fifth wall because of how it allows a person to see beyond the traditional four walls of a room.[9][10] A different usage of the term has described the fifth wall as the screen on which images are projected in shadow theatre.[11]
References
- ^ a b Bell, Elizabeth S. (2008), Theories of Performance, Los Angeles: Sage, p. 203, ISBN 9781412926379.
- ^ a b Wallis, Mick; Shepherd, Simon (1998), Studying plays, London: Arnold, p. 214, ISBN 0340731567.
- ^ "The Fourth Wall and the Third Space" by John Stevenson, creator or Playback Theatre.
- ^ Canby, Vincent (June 28, 1987), "Film view: sex can spoil the scene", New York Times, p. A.17, retrieved July 3, 2007.
- ^ Abelman, Robert (1998), Reaching a critical mass: a critical analysis of television entertainment, Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, pp. 8–11, ISBN 0805821996.
- ^ Hunte, Lynette; Lichtenfels, Peter (2005), Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage, London: Arden Shakespeare, p. 1, ISBN 1904271499.
- ^ Knowles, Richard Paul (2006), "Shakespeare, Language and the Stage, The Fifth Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from Criticism, Performance and Theatre Studies (review)", Shakespeare Quarterly, 57 (2): 235–237, doi:10.1353/shq.2006.0060.
- ^ Davenport, G.; Agamanolis, S.; Barry, B.; Bradley, B.; Brooks, K. (2000), "Synergistic storyscapes and constructionist cinematic sharing", IBM Systems Journal
{{citation}}: Unknown parameter|lastauthoramp=ignored (|name-list-style=suggested) (help). - ^ Newcomb, Horace (2004), Encyclopedia of Television (2nd ed.), New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, ISBN 1579583946.
- ^ Koepnick, Lutz P. (2007), Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 0801884896.
- ^ Kent, Lynne (2005), Breaking the Fifth Wall: Enquiry into Contemporary Shadow Theatre, Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Faculty.