Breaking the Fourth Wall: Part 1 [word and image]

Trends come and go and are rarely of any significance. Having gotten that disclaimer out of the way, I have noticed recently — say, within the last handful of years — that it is becoming fashionable in film/film related media to transcend the fourth wall taboo. Said "fourth wall" is of course a metaphorical drama term referring to the imaginary wall between the action and the audience and/or camera. This circumvention has made shown its face in many forms and styles, a majority of which I would consider satirical, but one form that has stood out to me recently has been that of opening credit sequences in films and other cinematic pieces.

What sets these apart from the typical opening sequences is the integration of the written credits with the action. There are many different ways in which I have seen this go down, and a lot of times it has been in combination with another cinematic trend involving credit sequences, which is saving it for the end of the film. The ones that I have noticed that were very conspicuously postponed to the films ending tended to be in the realm of campy action shows sloshing with extravagant cheesiness — such as Black Dynamite or The Losers. For the record, I only mention those two because my brain is not being cooperative in recalling some worthy examples, and it would be out of the question to re-watch every film I had seen in the last 3 or so years to find one.

Screen from Black Dynamite end credits

The recent trend of word graphically embedded into active imagery has of course come to fruition with the help of computer graphics related advancements yielding to the ease of innovation and trickery (though each instance is not necessarily the effect of computer graphic implementation). And there are two kinds: embedded word in a way that it seems to belong, while referencing a non-story related element (... I'm mostly talking about title and credits here, but it can be other things), and embedded word in a way that is made to appear as an obvious juxtaposition to the action by its mere physical presence rather than exclusively by its meaning. The latter tends to draw the viewers attention more toward the design of the feature as something that does not naturally belong and thus, I would say, is generally more conspicuous as a method of integration.

Here, the intro to the HBO drama Entourage, is an example of an opening sequence in which the credits are embedded in a way that they appear in an evidently naturally occurring media and form, given the context of the surrounding action taking place...




















And while it may be a video game rather than an actual film, Grand Theft Auto 4's incredibly cinematic opening suffices as an example for the second form in which the word is embedded in such a way that it serves as a juxtaposition in its physical form rather than by meaning alone...
Of course if it were a film, GTA4 would be rated R so, I would recommend skipping to about the 0:20 mark to see what I'm talking about without having to see/hear the rather odd, possibly NSFW business going on in the very beginning.



I know I have seen a title sequence done in a similar way as the one in Grand Theft Auto 4 in at least a film or two, but I am really having trouble thinking up some decent examples. If you read this and know of some of your own, please say so in the comments!