Excerpts taken from Lisa Kernan’s “Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers” (Univerity of Texas Press, 2004) along with my own interpretations.
“Trailers offer audiences “concise, direct address cinematic texts that serve as both attractions and as a form of persuasion”.
Obviously the key aim of a trailer is to persuade, otherwise there would be no audience to watch the film. Trailers are also visually attractive spectacles, as their primary purpose is to entertain their audience in under five minutes, which leaves the audience primed to want more.
“In trailers, images are selected and combined in ways that privilege attracting the spectator’s attention over sustaining narrative coherence. Yet trailers also maintain a relationship to the narrative they promote, and in this relationship between promotional images of attraction and coherent cinematic narrative lie the unique characteristics that constitute the rhetoric of trailers.”
In trailers narrative cohesion comes secondary to visual attraction, in a way it is almost postmodern, choosing style over substance so as to entice the audience. A trailer is meant to whet the appetite, and a successful trailer will do so by intriguing the audience, due to a trailer narrative which doesn’t quite make sense, or leaves the audience questioning, wondering, turning over the events in their mind.
“trailers are film paratexts. As Gérard Genette has characterised them, paratexts are those textual elements that emerge from and impart significance to a (literary) text but aren’t considered integral to the text itself, such as all prefatory material, dust jacket blurbs, advertisements and reviews. Specifically, trailers can be seen as instances of a film’s “public epitext.” (reference to Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997)
A trailer isn’t essential to a film, in terms of plot etc. but it is often essential in terms of getting the film “out there”, increasing audience awareness and making sure that when the film gets to the cinema there will be an audience waiting for it.
“most trailers have in common a few generic features: some sort of introductory or concluding address to the audience about the film either through titles or narration, selected scenes from the film, montages of quick-cut action scenes, and identifications of significant cast members or characters.”
These are the basic ingredients of a trailer, they form the conventions or expectations that an audience has of a trailer as well as laying the foundations for what a trailer needs to be successful. Variations on these conventions aren’t uncommon, and if done correctly can make the trailer more successful than one which follows this basic structure. In my trailer for instance, I identified my main character by visual means only. There is no mention of her name, and I gave the audience a very brief insight into her life. I did this to intrigue and tease my audience, but some members of my audience identified that this achieved a flattening of affect, as they felt distanced or unconnected with my character.
“Trailers construct a narrative time-space that differs from (and creates desire for) the fictive world of the film itself. The fast pace of most trailers accentuates the film’s surface of cinematic spectacle, displaying the film’s shiniest wares, or most attractive images, positioning it as a commodity for sale. Narrative, however, does not disappear in this process. Trailers are themselves little stories…”
A lot of the time audiences see a trailer for a movie and are impressed/intrigued/drawn into it so much that they decide to see the movie, and often they comment on how they were almost “tricked” by the trailer, how it wasn’t what they expected. For instance comedy trailers often showcase the funniest one-liners and most laughable slapstick events of the movie, so that when a consumer goes to see this movie they are disappointed as the film doesn’t “live up” to the trailer. This isn’t always the case however, as a trailer is such a short showcase for all the movie has to offer. The trailer cannot possibly show all of the best bits of the film, and therefore there is still a lot of entertainment and action left for the movie itself. Trailers are mini-narratives or little stories in themselves, as often a trailer will literally trick an audience into thinking that the film is of a certain genre or will follow a certain plot-line, whereas when they see the film itself, they are surprised and shocked by what they are actually presented with. For example the trailer for “A Perfect Getaway” (2009) begins with all the connotations (use of summery romantic music, slow editing, shots of the sun, beach, beautiful island etc) of a romance or a romantic comedy. However half-way through the trailer the pace of the editing picks up and the content changes from smiling couples to shots of weapons etc. and the audience realizes that instead this is a thriller. This makes the trailer especially memorable, as it plays with audience expectations, and shows the different ways in which a film can be interpreted, as it could be cut like a romance or like a thriller, two completely juxtaposing themes.
“since in trailers each of these abbreviated stand-in images is part of an ad for an as-yet-unseen film, they become charged with excess signification.”
It could be argued that each shot in a trailer has more meaning than in the actual film, as the trailer is so condensed each shot and each choice of editing, music, mise-en-scene etc. has to carry extra weight so that the audience can extract meaning and narrative cohesion.
This poster is interesting in that it doesn’t feature a main character; by only using the hands of two people it reveals very little about character, and adds a certain amount of anonymity which suggests these could be the hands of any of the Jews. There is a very limited color palette, with only the title and the sleeve of the child’s shirt giving any color. This draws attention to the title, and the lack of color also depcits the dark nature of the film. The list of names is just visible, but they almost fade into the background, signifying the lack of importance of the seemingly never ending list of Jews. The image of a child and man holding hands suggests hope and comfort and the accentuated paleness of their skin contrasts to the background, making their skin look like paper for the list of Jews.
Sofy's Blog 