10 META-Trailers Worth Watching

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Frederick Greene

As I noted in my Nov. 23rd post on Meta Trailers, trailers are always implicitly self-referential. Some trailers, however, foreground their status as familiar, formulaic and appealing feature film advertisements as the basis for their own promotional message.

Here is a list of 10 trailers that are as much about themselves as they are about the films for which they were produced. Typically, this self-conscious, “inside-joke” approach works for comedies and satires, but occasionally a dramatic or horror film uses it.


Comedian
The trailer for this documentary about Jerry Seinfeld performing as a stand-up comedian, sends up the Voice Over Artist and the cliche’d trailer rhetoric given him (or her) to read. While it tells us almost nothing about the film, this trailer routinely ranks in the list of best or funniest trailers ever.


Real Life
Here, Albert Brooks, speaking as himself, heralds his new film, “Real Life,” by spoofing the 3D viewing experience and its promotional excesses. We learn, briefly, that the film is about a family who finds its private existence the subject of a major motion picture, but the only footage we see is of Brooks goofing around with the presumed audience, us.


Miracle on 34th Street
This trailer opens with the “producer” of the movie being shown a “draft” of the trailer his marketing men have shot. He stops the preview after 30 seconds to complain that the approach is too “broad,” insisting that the trailer can’t be all the things they say it is. Then, he walks out onto the studio lot where he learns, from a succession of conversations with passing actors, stars and starlets, that his marketing guys were right. The film really is everything they said it was, and wonderful to boot.


Toys
Robin Williams hosts this trailer, standing in a wheatfield, goofing on how the trailer will look. But this is how the trailer looks: Robin Williams goofing in a wheatfield.


The Birds
Hitchcock uses irony to promote his horror film about Birds turning on their human predators. He offers a 5 minute lecture on the special friendship between mankind and the feathered co-inhabitants of the planet. He concludes by dining on a roast chicken. It’s classic Hitchcock, with the great director using his own celebrity as the vehicle for his delivery of the many reasons birds might hate us. The last 40 seconds of the trailers show Tippi Hedron in a panic, saying “they’re coming” over the sound of screeching birds.


Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
“It’s easy to talk about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf; it’s hard to tell about it,” says the dulcet-toned voice-over artist reading the nearly wall to wall copy that underlies a succession of stills, scenes, and raucous diegetic dialogue from the film. In the course of explaining the difficulty of making a trailer for this film, the voice-over manages to describe the set up, the actors and the conflict, while also lauding Albee the dramaturge and Nichols the director.


The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
This trailer tells the story of the movie by having its voice-over artist consult the “hitchhiker’s guide” for the term “movie trailer” and then read aloud the content as scenes from the movie play underneath. It’s one of the better pieces of movie advertising that I can think of as well as one of the more concise and comprehensive descriptions of movie trailers I’ve ever encountered.


Pink Flamingos
The original trailer for John Waters’ notorious film about people competing for the title of world’s filthiest couple, shows no scenes from the film, but uses audience reaction shots after a midnight screening as well as blurbs from influential critics to elicit interest in the scandalous movie.


The Muppets
In this teaser trailer from early in 2011, all the cliche’s of a formulaic romantic drama are parodied, including the sappy music cue and the shot of the downhearted male protagonist in the rain. But then, the cast run reveals the hitherto unexpected presence of Kermit and Miss Piggy. At this, Jason Siegal, the live-action star, interrupts the trailer to ask of the camera and audience, “Are there Muppets in this movie?” Indeed, there are. The trailer continues as an formulaic action adventure, extravaganza.


Anna Karenina (1935)

Told in the florid, hyperbolic style of 1930’s National Screen Service promotion, the expected titles and copy cards, cast run, scenes and closeups are interrupted by a 30 second appearance by child star Freddie Bartholomew, in costume, who welcomes the audience to this preview for his next picture, thanking us for our letters and encouragement and telling us what a treat it’s been to act with Ms. Garbo. Garbo is the true selling point of the trailer, which features her name in blinding white font, no less than 5 times. “Garbo with the dashing, flashing, gayest, maddest, most tempestuous sweetheart of her screen career,” is how Frederick March, her on-screen lover is introduced. Weird and wrong, but trying something new, this trailer is memorable mostly for being about itself and its formulae.

Creative Commons License
movietrailers101 by Fred Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted in Lists & Compilations | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Meta Movies – Trailers, Free Samples & Self-consciousness

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Frederick Greene


(A FILM ABOUT COMEDY WITH JERRY SEINFELD)

I have tried to use this blog to denaturalize and defamiliarize my subject. I’ve wanted to introduce critical distance into the appreciation of these short commercial films that are so universally enjoyed, so frequently consumed and so easily dismissed and (for the most part) quickly forgotten. And I’ve wanted to explain how they do what they do, since trailers have a very important function to perform, and it’s that job which, presumably, makes them what they are.

And yet what they are—-dense, short film texts that excerpt and recombine scenes from a feature film in order to appeal to audiences’ abiding interest in stars, spectacle, story and genre-—are meta movies, as much about themselves as advertisements and short films, as about the feature they promote.

(See the excellent, abstract, and completely self-reflexive trailer for Comedian above, which makes fun of copy clichés and the deep-throated voice-over actors who make them resonate.)

You see, what I’ve noticed in the process of “denaturalizing” trailers for my students is that trailers denaturalize their companion films. By excerpting and recombining the film, by addressing and soliciting the audience, trailers make plain the fabrication of the film itself, its similarly produced and designed nature, its commercial quality. There’s nothing surprising that an advertisement, as a kind of meta discourse, would offer insight into the product. But that insight is contrary to, if not in contravention of, the objectives and achievement of classic continuity editing—still the dominant and the defining approach to filmmaking in our industry.

Hollywood films, to an extraordinary degree, are edited and presented to maximize their seamlessness, to minimize their artifice, and to shape the perspective, point of view, and visual experience of their audiences. Rules and conventions direct where the camera should be positioned, how time and space should be portrayed, and where the eye should be directed or allowed to linger, all in service of what is considered a natural style of story telling. The surface of the film, its material reality and mode of production is expected be transparent when not invisible. What’s important is what we are shown, not the showing itself.

Trailers obey different rules and conventions, and eschew the “natural” style of storytelling in favor of the self-conscious and mannered. The only thing natural about a trailer is its origin and its family resemblance to other trailers. Meta-phenomenon like trailers can never be natural; they’re always mediated, usually complex, hybrid (at least) and quintessentially self-conscious.

We often call trailers, “Free samples distributed to a proven consumer.” I’ve said it hundreds of times myself. But it’s not really true. If you think about free-samples that a non-entertainment business might make available, they usually consist of a small version of the product being sold. (Think medicine the Dr. might offer; a cheese square, or chips and salsa at the grocery; a thimble full of frozen yogurt from Pinkberry.) There’s no such thing as a small portion of movie. Even clips taken straight from the film, without any kind of marketing inflection, are only fragments of a larger, integrated whole.

Trailers are clearly not samples of the film as a whole. Instead, they are their own self-contained films, made by rearranging the elements of the feature they promote into their own story presentation, narrated with extra-diegetic elements like graphic cards, voice over, titles, and graphics to fulfill their marketing objectives. Trailers aren’t free-samples, but alternate versions and simulations of the film. They are bait that is always already switched. Imagine that when you next gobble up a cheese square on a toothpick at the deli counter it is packaged and labeled, “this is the cheese that you want to buy.” Do you see the analogy, or lack thereof?

When trailer scholar Lisa Kernan described the scandal of trailers, their disclosure of the contradictions that underlie the industry, I think she was describing trailers self-conscious quality and self-critical ability as a inescapable aspect of their hybridity. Their meta-phenomenality is powerful and productive, not merely derivative. While is it a truism that trailers are subordinate to and determined by their films, we should also remember that insofar as every film that expects to be distributed needs a trailer, feature films are developed and produced and distributed in compliance to the extant or incipient marketing vision of their trailer.

Movies enchant, seduce, transport and mesmerize by making their status as manufactured objects and commercial enterprises invisible. Trailers enchant, seduce, transport and mesmerize by telling us what they are, what they’re going to do, and then doing it.

How does this help a would-be trailermaker or copywriter? Generally speaking, the more one understands about one’s industry and creative practice, the more likely one is to succeed. Specifically, it helps explain why self-reflexivity is a tried and true formula of movie marketing. And, as you can see from the trailer for Comedian as well as those for hosted trailers as a class, and countless others, it’s a reminder that trailer makers have options and resources traditional filmmakers don’t.

Creative Commons License
movietrailers101 by Fred Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted in Observations and Provocations | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Confidently Underselling "THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO:" A READING

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Frederick Greene

 

My bad!   I hijacked the promised “trailer reading” of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO for a disquisition on the temporal quality of trailer reception and the typical “quantity” of trailer consumption.  (See my previous post.)

 

In this post, I’d like to offer a reading of the “International” trailer for David Fincher’s remake of the first volume in Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, a recent global sensation for book readers and movie goers alike.

 

In my previous post, I complained of being overwhelmed by the density of visual content.  Having had the chance to watch the trailer a half dozen times or more, I now feel capable of describing how the story and the promotion are articulated in this 1:57 trailer.

 

We begin with the P.O.V. of protagonist and investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) as he turns up an estate driveway, approaching an imposing private residence. Henrik Vanger, (Christopher Plummer) speaks in voice over, explaining the job for which he has hired Mikael.  He wants Mikael to investigate the rich, greedy, detestable, multi-generational family of which he is the patriarch.  In terms of trailer structure, this is ACT I,  “the task.”

 

Vanger wishes to know who killed his daughter, Harriet, 40 years previous. All he knows of the identity of the psychopath is that it had to have been a relative, someone, indeed, who is still scheming to drive him mad to this very day.   I call this act, or movement of the trailer, the “context” or situation.  In it, Vanger’s motives are explained and the stakes are established.

 

In the next 30 seconds, roughly from :30 – 1:00, three characters are presented:  The killer, whose psychological warfare against Vanger is described; Mikael, who’s wariness to take the job is explained.  (A high-profile muck-raker, he was “leaked” false information which he published, only to lose his journalistic credibility and his savings.) Lastly, and at greatest length, Lisbeth, the titular Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is described, exhibited and shown interacting with her state-appointed guardian.  All three portrayals establish her oddity, her alienation from the system and norms of feminine beauty/appearance, as well as her fierce independence.

 

At about 1:01, Mikael asks Lisbeth to partner with him in the investigation and bring her extraordinary digital analytical skills to bear.  (Her introduction/presentation into the trailer was prompted by Mikael’s V.O. claim that he would need a research assistant.)  He seeks to motivate her by explaining the object of their search:  a killer of women.

 

From 1:05 to 1:21, scenes from their investigation and working relationship are shown, as the editing speed increases and the music cues indicate rising tension.

After 1:22, their investigation continues though now it is clear that they are meeting with resistance: physical danger, psychological threat and the emotional challenges of a very old, very ugly case.   Images of gunfire, flight, fire, additional victims, etc., are shown beneath voice over by Lisbeth about her discoveries and further details from Henrik about Harriet’s murder.

 

At 1:43, the pace accelerates even more, as graphic cards inform the viewer that this movie derives “FROM THE / INTERNATIONAL /BEST-SELLING/ TRILOGY.”  A final montage of images—cut several per second, almost to the point of subliminality—concludes in a shot of Lisbeth from behind, riding aggressively on her motorcycle through a tunnel, dressed in her habitual black, before a final freeze frame shot of her, head-on and helmeted, face slightly angled, her skin pale, eyebrowless and pierced, her visage overexposed and alien, staring at the viewer.   This is what a girl with a dragon tattoo looks like: fearsome, freakish, dangerous, unfamiliar and curious.

 

Like the images over which it flows, the music begins slowly and soberly, with a few key strokes of the piano, to which electronic/synthetic instrumentation and rhythm are joined.  Then a muted, muffled helicopter sound alights on the track, followed by animal roars or human screams, distorted and echoing, crescendoing toward the final burst of images and emotion, ultimately dissolving in the final image of Lisbeth on her motorcycle, fading away as does her face from the screen.

 

As far as editing pace goes, this trailer is a straightforward build. It is never exactly slow or indulgent, but the shot lengths decrease as the cutting speed increases.  I counted well over 120 distinct shots, or one per minute, although the last 30 seconds is dense with visual information, almost to the point of unintelligibility.

 

As befits its subject matter—an investigation into a mystery—the trailer delivers multiple shots of its protagonists looking, reading, noticing, pointing, searching, snooping, poking through, and stealing—but also, in turn being watched, assaulted and chased.   This is in no way surprising and visually overdetermines the diegetic dialogue which explains the context and the conflict.  The trailer is organic, motivated and neither experimental in approach nor confusing stylistically.  It is, however, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, dense.  It also, appropriately, bears the signature—in terms of editing, color palette, and tone—of its director, Mr. Fincher, a star-director with a loyal following and zealous fans.

 

The only moment in the trailer that seems forced is in the presentation of characters where Mikael explains his new-found caution in his work, then in the next breath delivers the non-sequitur, “I need a research assistant.”   To the casual movie-goer and trailer consumer, this unmotivated transition would not, perhaps, register amid all the other information and plot being presented.  But having watched it repeatedly and with my pause button at the ready, I found it inelegant and clunky, unlike the compelling (albeit rapid) visual storytelling and diegetic voice over.

 

In appealing to audiences, this trailer bypasses its three well known stars (actors Craig & Plummer and director, Fincher) to instead focus on the unsolved mystery that provokes the action.   Whereas most trailers try to establish a point of identification, this one goes out of its way to emphasize the unconventional, foreign, even unlikable qualities of Lisbeth and the Vanger clan.  Rather, this preview presents its protagonists as curiosities, objects of interest we need to know as the price of participating in the “international, best-selling trilogy” with which we’re assumed to be familiar.  There are no taglines nor calls to action.   It is an understated approach, relying on buzz for the remake and acquaintance with the global literary sensation of Mr. Larsson’s dark, violent and erotic Swedish thrillers.

 

Through its mise-en-scene, editing and visual presentation, the trailer makes plain the generic pleasures it has to offer those fans who like action, violence, gore and terror, with or without a happy ending, since the preview concludes without resolving that issue.

 

All in all, this is a piece of movie marketing confident in the quality and appeal of its feature, certain that its target audience is already sufficiently aware of the film it “previews” to appreciate this short film for its visual artistry and its rare and refreshing avoidance of the hard sell.

 
Creative Commons License
movietrailers101 by Fred Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted in Readings | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment