[moviefilter] Gunshot 'shatters' film-camera lens: which movie?

December 23, 2013 10:10 AM

Please help me remember a film scene. During a shoot-out, possibly a car chase, a gunshot hits and shatters the camera lens. That's the trope anyway. This occurs in an iconic movie. TVtropes.org lists some similar moments but those are pretty random and weak examples, whereas the one I have in mind is from a movie classic. Could it be "Bonnie and Clyde"? -- but I checked film stills and nothing's showing up. Help!
posted by taramosalata to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Best answer: This is not a shootout and the lens doesn't shatter but is it this bit from Spellbound where the gun turns around and shoots the camera?
posted by interplanetjanet at 11:43 AM on December 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Not the one I have in mind, but thanks for the reminder of another great moment!
posted by taramosalata at 12:03 PM on December 23, 2013

The John Wayne movie McQ has car chases, shooting, and some broken glass imagery. That's all I remember about the film, though. It's hardly a classic.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 12:57 PM on December 23, 2013

I think of Saving Private Ryan, Children of Men, and vividly in the original trailer for Twister a tire comes flying at the camera. The title sequence of James Bond movies plays with this, I wonder if they ever did it during the film proper.
posted by artlung at 2:29 PM on December 23, 2013

Best answer: Speaking as a film buff, I don't know this specifically. From the era of film cameras, it would have been difficult to simulate well (although obviously there are such things as the 007 gunbarrel, but they look created). Perhaps from the digital era, when we have examples such as the bloody camera lens in Children of Men, and many many potential examples of in-narrative cameras (like the helmet cams in Aliens). But really, when Cuaron did that effect, it was controversial to keep "meta" shots like that in your film. So I'm not sure I think it would be back that far (although, to be sure, the general concept of turning the tables on the audience goes all the way back to The Great Train Robbery's shock ending). But a lot of these POV shots are only possible in the age of digital and its potentially tiny cameras (even cameras at the end of a fiber optic rope, with all the works in a harness at the other end), as in much of Breaking Bad.

artlung, no, none of the Bond films did this, although they did have the climactic scene in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, loosely influenced by Bonnie and Clyde.

There is, of course, the sniper scene in SPR -- itself based on a legendary "sniper's duel" at Stalingrad, depicted in the film Enemy at the Gates -- although not with an eyepiece-smashing.
posted by dhartung at 10:40 PM on December 25, 2013 [1 favorite]