If any­one tries to claim that mod­ern day movies have too many spe­cial effects remind them of this. Films have always used spe­cial effects to trick the audi­ence, and we’re just using new vari­a­tions of tools from a cen­tu­ry ago. In fact, right from the begin­ning, cre­ators like Georges Méliès were push­ing the bound­aries of cel­lu­loid and 24 frames per sec­ond like the show­men and magi­cians they were.

By the time we get to the silent come­di­ans as seen in our above video, tech­nol­o­gy had advanced along with the pure phys­i­cal com­e­dy of the stars. Yes, they were amaz­ing and nim­ble ath­letes, but they weren’t stu­pid. Cam­era trick­ery helped them look super­hu­man.

The first exam­ple shows Harold Lloyd’s icon­ic stunt from 1923’s Safe­ty Last!, where he hung over the streets of Los Ange­les from a clock face. Only he wasn’t real­ly. Using forced per­spec­tive, a con­struct­ed build­ing edi­fice, and a safe mat­tress a few feet below shows how Lloyd faced no dan­ger at all. Edit­ing, too, cre­ates so much of the effect, as we have seen how high the clock is com­pared to the ground in pre­vi­ous shots. The angle on the streets below and in the dis­tance real­ly sell the scene com­pared to just shoot­ing sky.

In fact, this forced per­spec­tive is still used in mod­ern films: Peter Jack­son used it a lot in The Lord of the Rings to give the impres­sion that Gan­dalf was twice as tall as Hob­bit Fro­do sim­ply by con­struct­ing the sets small­er.

And when back­grounds are basic like sand dunes, even the low bud­get film­mak­er can achieve some amaz­ing effects with no mon­ey, just a bunch of cool minia­tures:

Then again, Jack­ie Chan one-upped Lloyd for real in his 1983 film Project A, when he dan­gles from a three-sto­ry clock hand only to crash through two canopies onto the ground below. It’s a stunt so nice, they show you it twice!

The oth­er favorite trick of the silent films was mat­te paint­ing. As long as the cam­era doesn’t move, a piece of glass with a pho­to-real­is­tic paint­ing on it can seam­less­ly fit into the action.

In Char­lie Chaplin’s 1936 Mod­ern Times, that allows the come­di­an to skate very close to a three floor drop with­out even being in dan­ger. (Tech­ni­cal­ly, the cam­era *does* move in this shot, but it’s a short pan which wouldn’t affect the illu­sion.)

This old-school method has gone away, though up through the ‘80s great mat­te paint­ing artists were work­ing on films like the Star Wars tril­o­gy and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now a dig­i­tal mat­te artist works in three dimen­sions, not two, with end­less finesse and tweak­ing at their dis­pos­al, like in Game of Thrones:

The mat­te is the basis, real­ly, of all mod­ern dig­i­tal effects. Wher­ev­er there is a green screen, you’re see­ing the evo­lu­tion of the mat­te. You prob­a­bly have an app on your phone that does some­thing sim­i­lar, and can mag­i­cal­ly trans­port you to where you real­ly want to be…just like film.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts–and Keaton’s 5 Rules of Com­ic Sto­ry­telling

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

Cap­ti­vat­ing GIFs Reveal the Mag­i­cal Spe­cial Effects in Clas­sic Silent Films

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

“Though hard­ly a cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­piece,” film crit­ic Andre Soares writes, “or even a good film,” Al Jolson’s 1927 The Jazz Singer will for­ev­er bear the dis­tinc­tion of “the first time in a fea­ture film that syn­chro­nized sound and voic­es could be heard in musi­cal num­bers and talk­ing seg­ments.” What usu­al­ly goes unre­marked in film his­to­ry is that Indi­an cin­e­ma was nev­er far behind its U.S. coun­ter­part. The country’s first fea­ture sound film appeared just four years after The Jazz Singer. Now lost, the love sto­ry Alam Ara debuted in March of 1931 and ini­ti­at­ed a ven­er­a­ble tra­di­tion with its sev­er­al songs, includ­ing the first major fil­mi music hit.

The movie was so pop­u­lar, one his­to­ri­an notes, “police aid had to be sum­moned to con­trol the crowds.” Its direc­tor Ardeshir Irani was inspired by anoth­er ear­ly Hol­ly­wood part-talkie musi­cal, 1929’s Show Boat, which, like his film, used the Movi­etone sys­tem to record sound, rather than the Vita­phone sys­tem used in The Jazz Singer. Movi­etone, or Fox Movi­etone, as it came to be known after William Fox bought the patents in 1926, was also respon­si­ble for anoth­er ear­ly film devel­op­ment, the sound news­reel, a tech­nol­o­gy that made its way to India almost as soon as it debuted in the U.S.

The first sound news­reel, show­ing footage of Charles Lindbergh’s tak­ing off in the “Spir­it of St. Louis,” debuted in 1927 in New York. In Novem­ber 1929, Fox opened the first exclu­sive news­reel the­ater on Broad­way, and in Jan­u­ary of that same year, a Movi­etone cam­era cap­tured the street scenes of Bom­bay (now Mum­bai) that you see above, over 13 min­utes of footage com­plete with live audio record­ing of bustling crowds, busy ven­dors and laun­dry work­ers, honk­ing auto­mo­biles, and clip-clop­ping hors­es.

This incred­i­ble doc­u­ment pre­serves the sights and sounds of a sig­nif­i­cant Indi­an slice of life from 90 years ago, and shows how ear­ly the tech­nol­o­gy for mak­ing sound films arrived on the sub­con­ti­nent. When Ardeshir Irani began film­ing his ground­break­ing musi­cal the fol­low­ing year, he would use exact­ly this same tech­nol­o­gy, shoot­ing all of the dia­logue and music live, on a closed set late at night to avoid unwant­ed noise like the street sounds you hear above.

Learn more of the Fox Movi­etone news­reel sto­ry here, and here, learn how Indi­an cin­e­ma began in Mum­bai in 1899 when Indi­an pho­tog­ra­phers, writ­ers, the­ater impre­sar­ios, and entre­pre­neurs like Irani took the new tech­nol­o­gy and used it to build a cul­tur­al empire of their own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

India on Film, 1899–1947: An Archive of 90 His­toric Films Now Online

100 Years of Cin­e­ma: New Doc­u­men­tary Series Explores the His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma by Ana­lyz­ing One Film Per Year, Start­ing in 1915

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 His­tor­i­cal Films on YouTube

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Safe­ty Last, the 1923 film star­ring Harold Lloyd, fea­tures one of the most icon­ic scenes from the silent film era. Writes Roger Ebert, the scene above is “by gen­er­al agree­ment the most famous shot in silent com­e­dy: a man in a straw hat and round horn-rim glass­es, hang­ing from the minute hand of a clock 12 sto­ries above the city street. Strange, that this shot occurs in a film few peo­ple have ever seen. Harold Lloy­d’s Safe­ty Last (1923), like all of his films, was pre­served by the come­di­an but rarely shown.” All of that might be about to change. Along with a num­ber of oth­er clas­sic works, Safe­ty Last went into the pub­lic domain this week. So now every­one can watch the film, when­ev­er they please. Watch a com­plete ver­sion on YouTube here. Restored ver­sions of the film can be pur­chased through Cri­te­ri­on.

Safe­ty Last will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Avalanche of Nov­els, Films and Oth­er Works of Art Will Soon Enter the Pub­lic Domain: Vir­ginia Woolf, Char­lie Chap­lin, William Car­los Williams, Buster Keaton & More

65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Cap­ti­vat­ing GIFs Reveal the Mag­i­cal Spe­cial Effects in Clas­sic Silent Films

The Pow­er of Silent Movies, with The Artist Direc­tor Michel Haz­anavi­cius

Do you remem­ber the first time you saw the fourth wall bro­ken? Few of us prob­a­bly do, but maybe we all should, giv­en how radi­al a depar­ture from estab­lished dra­mat­ic con­ven­tion — specif­i­cal­ly, the con­ven­tion dic­tat­ing that a work of dra­mat­ic art not acknowl­edge the fact that it is a work of dra­mat­ic art — fourth-wall-break­age rep­re­sents. Then again, a work of art can break the fourth wall sub­tly, too sub­tly to make an out­sized impact on our con­scious­ness: take, for exam­ple, all the brief but know­ing glances movie char­ac­ters have direct­ed at their audi­ences through­out almost the entire his­to­ry of cin­e­ma.

A fair few of those glances appear in the super­cut of 400 break­ages of the fourth wall above (which may well con­tain the first one you ever wit­nessed). It draws from films from a vari­ety of time peri­ods, Hol­ly­wood clas­sics and block­busters as well as less­er-known pic­tures.

Togeth­er with the Press Play fourth-wall-break­age super­cut below, it pro­vides an overview of just how wide a vari­ety of ways film­mak­ers have found to momen­tar­i­ly breach what Vin­cent Can­by once described as “that invis­i­ble scrim that for­ev­er sep­a­rates the audi­ence from the stage.” Most films break the fourth wall for laughs, but oth­ers have done it in ser­vice of emo­tion­al, aes­thet­ic, and even intel­lec­tu­al ends.

None of this is to say that the fourth wall stood per­fect­ly intact before the colos­sus of cin­e­ma came along to smash it. The con­cept goes at least as far back as 17th-cen­tu­ry France, first used as a term by Molière and lat­er more ful­ly defined by Enlight­en­ment icon Denis Diderot. But the­atri­cal per­form­ers must have been break­ing the fourth wall, or at least pok­ing holes in it, even before the fourth wall was quite up: long ago, we read in his­tor­i­cal accounts of the­ater around the world, audi­ences even expect­ed a cer­tain degree of inter­ac­tion with the action onstage — or at least they expressed their thoughts on it, often force­ful­ly, attempt­ing to break the fourth wall from the oth­er direc­tion.

Over time, we, the cre­ators and view­ers of dra­ma alike, built the fourth wall, and it has sel­dom tak­en us long to expect its pro­tec­tion in every medi­um we enjoy: the­ater and film, yes, but tele­vi­sion, video games, and even lit­er­a­ture as well. “It is not a good idea to inter­rupt the nar­ra­tive too often,” writes J.M. Coet­zee in Eliz­a­beth Costel­lo, a nov­el that breaks the fourth wall and a host of oth­er con­ven­tion besides, “since sto­ry­telling works by lulling the read­er or lis­ten­er into a dream­like state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, super­seded by the time and space of the fic­tion.” A lit­er­ary sto­ry­teller of Coet­zee’s cal­iber would know. But what oth­er art form has been as often com­pared to a dream, or felt as much like a dream, as film — and what oth­er dreams play out on, lit­er­al­ly, a wall?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Them Watch Us: A His­to­ry of Break­ing the “Fourth Wall” in Film

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the His­to­ry of Movies: From the First Mov­ing Pic­tures to the Rise of Mul­ti­plex­es & Net­flix

Cin­e­ma His­to­ry by Titles & Num­bers

We’re Gonna Build a Fourth Wall, and Make the Brechtians Pay for It

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.