Trailers are and Trailers do…..Insights from Scholars rather than trailermakers

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Frederick Greene

“The Production of a film includes the making of its “consumable” identity. Certain filmic elements are developed into a premeditated network of advertising and promotion that will enter the social sphere of reception. Such an intricate relation between film and promotion has been intensified historically: every new invention in the media, from radio to TV, to cable tv, videocassettes has provided new forums for advertising.”
–-Barbara Klinger, “Digressions at the Cinema: Reception & Mass Culture,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4, Summer 1989

“Adopted as an early cross-media text, the trailer now sits across cinema, television, home video, the internet, game consoles, mobile phones and iPods…. Exploring these texts, and their technological display, reveals how modern distribution techniques have created a shifting and interactive relationship between film studio and audience.”
–Keith Johnston, “The coolest way to watch movies in the world: Trailers in the Digital Age,” Convergence, May 2008

Twenty years separates these two comments about trailers and their technological context, and yet they are remarkably alike in their assessment and prediction. Writing in 1989, Klinger’s list of transformational media inventions could be updated without any loss of sense or emphasis by adding “P.C.’s, the internet, iPods, smartphones and tablets,” as interim innovations that have “provided new forums for advertising.” Klinger uses the film-theoretical terminology of reception, Johnston prefers the plainer “audience” to name that crucial participant in the dynamic relationship mediated by movie advertising.

But whereas Klinger sees technology as historically intensifying the relationship between film and promotion, Johnston sees technology as a constituent of it. Perhaps their difference can be understood as the difference between adding new “fora” for advertisement vs. transforming the very nature of that promotional/advertising relationship.

No doubt Klinger, having experienced technological change and the advent of “new-media” in the past two decades, would want to restate her seminal observation about trailers (it’s one of the most widely cited in the academic literature.) With trailer viewing having undergone a fundamental change from being a singular, collective experience, coordinated with and prior to the film’s release, to one that is more often individual, repeated and a stand-alone entertainment, I’m inclined to credit Johnston’s correction.

But what I most appreciate about both pronouncements is what they suggest about trailers and their industry, viz., that the future is dynamic and developing AND that careers in entertainment A/V marketing (advertising, promotion, publicity) are not going away any time soon. Indeed, such specialized filmmaking skills will be in demand so long as audio-visual entertainment needs advertising and so long as the proliferation of content and of platforms continues.

Lastly, Johnston’s “cross-media” and Klinger’s “premeditated network” strike me as harbingers of and synonyms for the defnitionally-controvsersial new-media buzz-word, transmedia. If Transmedia is about telling a story across multiple platforms, than trailers should certainly qualify, insofar as the official trailer presented in theaters and online tells the same or similar version of that cut-down version broadcast as a TV spot, or the specially cut and reformatted one designed to exploit the small screens of iPods and smartphones. In the event of a 3D version, subtle changes in editing will exist between the 2D theatrical version and the one destined for 3 dimensional and/or Imax screens. While most of the transmedia talk is of traditional content, for content rich marketing materials, e.g. trailers in all their variety, the same dynamic appears to be at work.

Agree? Disagree? Do let me know.

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Trailers Are….. Insights from scholars of (rather than makers of) trailers

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Frederick Greene

ANDY KUEHN - TRAILERMAKER

Trailer maker and film marketing pioneer Andy Kuehn told me repeatedly that the movie industry operated on the guild system: start at the bottom; work your way up; learn by apprenticeship; pay your dues; serve your time; rely on those you know and who you’ve worked with before. Suspect outsiders, interlopers, consultants, experts and academics!

If I’d had any sense, I would have applied for a job as a runner or assistant in a trailer house, after getting my Ph.D. in English Literature, rather than just hanging out my shingle and demanding work. But 15 years later, I still persist in believing the point I argued in my dissertation: outsiders, marginal types, and the excluded usually have a better view of the mainstream and the center, precisely because of their distance from it. If they can straddle both perspectives, so much the better. (This is, of course, a pitch for the value of my own unique position as both a working professional in the industry and a scholar-researcher of their subject.)

In today’s post I want to quote a few of the film scholars whose writing on A/V marketing I find informative, insightful and persuasive. I should also note that their scholarly work is informed by exhaustive research within the industry and extensive interviews with those who make trailers, as well as by a love for the subject and a passion for writing and teaching about it.

PROFESSOR DR. HEDIGER

In her seminal, well-reviewed 2006 book, COMING ATTRACTIONS (U. of Texas Press), UCLA Librarian and Professor Lisa Kernan defines and categorizes trailers this way:

Trailers are….”a brief film text that usually displays images from a specific feature film while asserting its excellence, and that is created for the purpose of projecting in theaters to promote a film’s theatrical release. Trailers are a Film paratext—an element that emerges from and imparts significance to a film, but isn’t integral to the film itself. They are part of the film’s public epitext. They are the ‘Film we want to see.'”

By paratext, she means surrounding or collateral materials, much like a book jacket with author photo and bio or back cover with review blurbs or praise for other works, functions in publishing. Titles, forwards are paratexts. By epitext, she means announcements from “outside” the text itself. A review, for example, or an advertisement.

Kernan’s claim that the trailer is the “film we want to see,” may have been inspired by the pronouncement of French auteur/filmmaker, Jean Luc Godard, as repeated by my eminent friend, Prof. Vinzenz Hediger in the interview he gave to my documentary on movie trailers: “I’d like to quote Jean Luc Goddard who said, quite simply, Trailers are the perfect film…Trailers are promises given that are never broken.”(Vinzenz was recently appointed Professor of Film, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main–for those Theory Heads out there, this is the home of the “Frankfurt School” were Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer, et al. taught, thought and wrote.)

Hediger paraphrases this notion of the unbroken promise as a guarantee that trailers are the one film that will never let you down. That’s because you, the audience, do the imaginative work, projecting your desire into all the gaps in story telling and characterization and spectacle and genre that a trailer necessarily exposes. Enabled by its own limitations and elliptical construction, the trailer invites us to believe that the coming film will satisfy all our desires, delivering the plenitude of which it can only herald, preview and glimpse.

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La Dolce Vita: Marketing the Sweet Life as a Still Life

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Frederick Greene

[youtube=www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YZjAn0GZfE]

Film scholars date the contemporary period of trailermaking to the early 1960s’, pointing to such bold and formula rejecting previews as Dr Strangelove and The Night of the Iguana (both 1963) as avatars of the new approach. But the trailer for Federico Fellini’s film, La Dolce Vita, anticipates many of the signal innovations that define the revolution to come in movie marketing. Looking at it in 2012, its sound design, editing, and visual storytelling seem fresh, provocative and powerful. Who its producer and editor were, and whether they continued their trailer-blazing work, I’m unable to say. But in this post, I want to celebrate their filmmaking artistry and marketing craft.

Let’s begin with the editing: a combination of live action and stills, quick-cut into a dense, surreal 2 minute impression, that emphasizes feeling over narration and style over storytelling. There are over 100 shots/scenes in this trailer, far more than ordinary. But then, this is neither an ordinary film nor a typical preview.

Two multi-second, live-action sequences bookend the central sequence of stills edited to an infectious, exhilarating, maddening conga beat. Both live sequences show a scrum of photo-journalists jostling one another for the best shot of movie-star Ekberg, de-planing, but simultaneously suggesting, presumably, that what they’ve framed in the viewfinder, is what we’re seeing on screen. Late in the trailer, the edit decisions come 3 or 4 to the second, the pace quickened, the action near-frantic, the events almost unassimilable, apart from the sense that all is not right with this world. Roman sophisticates participate in louche and scandalous (rouged men in women’s clothing!!) entertainments; media types and movie stars, aristocrats and streetwalkers, paysans and urbanites people a frenzied tableau of Dionysian sensuality, religious mania and existential dread.

The copy, rather than explaining the characters, story or conflict, advertises the impact and the quality of the emotion. The French trailer (only the language of the copy is different than the Italian, original) describes it as “Une Fresque Grandiose et Fascinante. / Le Portrait la plus bouleversant et le plus decherent de notre époque:” — A grandiose and fascinating frescoe/ the most wrenching and affecting portrait of our era. (Translation, mine.) Such claims deploy the promotional rhetoric of the Circus ringmaster. They’re grandiloquent, hyperbolic and superlative.
But such an approach is, it should be remembered, also the dominant and defining style of film advertising since the 20’s. In this regard, the trailer keeps faith with tradition.

In terms of positioning, the film is presented as an event, rather than a story or a character study which it also is, more precisely. Of course, the language of the copy run might have been borrowed from a review, rather than generated expressly for the trailer, but if so, they are without attribution and harnessed to promotion rather than criticism.

Now, if the movie is as claimed, a frescoe — a fresh wall painting — or figuratively, a living tapestry; a portrait of life, presented to the public for its consumption– the trailer foregrounds details of that tableau, showing discrete scenes and characters and situations without establishing shot, context or a discernible plot line, beyond the evaluative title, “The Good/Sweet Life.” It will be clear to competent viewers that the sense of these words is ironic.

The trailermakers rely on human curiosity, whose appetite for further knowledge has been whetted by the provocative photos of Mastroianni’s Roman Holiday. Of course, if you haven’t a taste for moving and wrenching tales of glamorous, dissipated, world-weary and godless Europeans, this isn’t your kind of movie. But in 1960, those who wanted to know more were, I’m guessing, college educated, urban, traveled, sophisticated and interested in film art. This was not (and still isn’t) a 4 quadrant movie or a blockbuster. Still, were you to have bought a ticket when the film came to town, you couldn’t say you hadn’t been informed as well as warned.

The marker of its film-art bonafides and cinematic pretension is celebrated/notorious Director, Federico Fellini. And, beyond Fellini’s brand, there are luminaries of the European film world: Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimee and Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg are recognizably featured despite the absence of cast run.

The images—of characters, event, and place—mostly depthless interiors and a long shots of dusty, non-establishing exteriors—are fragmentary, discrete, frantic and euphoric, cynical and yearning, much like, I suppose, the movie they herald. In this way the trailer tells you little; but it shows you everything, except for the order, the meaning, and the emphasis, which is, come to think of it, a pretty good sample of life, good, sweet or otherwise.

Beyond the driving, seductive and hypnotic drum beats, the only other sound cues derive from shouts and curses of the scuffling journalists, jockeying for position as the object of their photographic gaze (movie star EKberg) descends from the plane. Of course, what they’re looking at, flashbulbs popping, lenses focused, is you, seated in the audience, hungry for glimpses of the sweet life found in movies generally, a vision revealed as an empty imposture by this movie in particular.

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