10 Film Scenes That Broke The Camera

Nobody who's seen Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange will ever forget the iconic scene where protagonist Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) throws himself out of a window after ending up locked in a room with no escape from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - as the brainwashing he's been subjected to makes him feel sick whenever he hears Beethoven.

There's a distinctive first-person shot at the very end of the sequence, with a camera seemingly taking a tumble out of the window before Kubrick suddenly cuts to black.

If you assumed Kubrick came up with a clever pulley system to keep the camera safe or perhaps even executed the shot in reverse, neither scenario is in fact true.

As it turns out, Kubrick simply took the camera, encased it in a box, and had his crew throw it out a third-floor window of the hotel they were shooting in, lens-first.

Getting the camera to land lens-first was tricky, though, and it took six attempts for Kubrick to get the convincingly first-person shot he wanted.

And though the body of the camera itself miraculously survived such punishment, less surprisingly the lens was totally obliterated by the successful shot, as it made direct, unprotected contact with the concrete floor.