The Incredible Art of Trailers Mbali Mashaba
From the sleek R&B and Jazz melodies painting the parallel romantic worlds in The Photograph, to the perfectly selected voice overs and rapid montage in Judas and The Black Messiah, trailers have not only proved to win us over in choosing a film to watch but also offer the potential to stand the test of time as their own art forms. Filmmaking can be seen as an art form with its own set of language and aesthetic considerations used to advance a narrative or conceptual goal. Several sub-art forms have emerged from its basis to aid in its distribution and advancement, creating a new set artistic practice altogether. I argue that trailers function as their own genres of art that play a key role in the commodification and consumption of film but moreover filmmaking as an art form.
Trailers can be described as types of pre-narrative systems of filmmaking made up of fragmented selected parts of a larger narrative used to attract a desired audience to a film or narrative. They are free samples, aiding in moviegoing decision-making and operate as a unique form of narrative film exhibition and distribution. Furthermore, they are a genre of filmmaking themselves, that also operates as a form of art and artistic practice. According to various art scholars, art can be seen as being tied to originality, expressed in various forms and with various media, a process which is illuminated in trailer making and the trailer itself, which is in essence an original larger and metatext derived from a pretext (an existing film or narrative itself) that is embedded with gaze, genre, dialogue, narration, setting and the possible revelation of character and structure, by selection of sequences to invoke feelings of desire, mystery and curiosity to viewers. I use metatext in this instance to describe a text that exists inside another text, for example, a trailer makes use of various filmic elements from a larger film text to create a new text that functions both as a promotional vehicle and a claim of a different kind of truth about the film it promotes, through selection, omission and spectacle. This is evident in how we perceive films before even watching them to completion by simply watching their trailers.
Audiences watching trailers are aware of its breaks in spatial and temporal representation and buy into the curiosity of the omitted narrative that they are yet to see, often falling into the playful mystery and nostalgia of a film they have not seen yet. These trailers work as rhetorical appeals, relying on certain qualities that the viewer brings to the trailer which leaves room for the spectators’ own expectations of emotional, physical, aesthetic or other responses. Therefore, trailers like other forms of art, allow for the audience to derive their own meaning-making, thus operating as a new narrative, with its own spatial-temporal flows, accentuating a film’s surface while commodifying it.
Take the controversial 2-minute 17 seconds trailer of the Amazon Prime Video series, Them, executive produced by Lena Waithe, for example. Upon its online release, it was met with various layers of critique, mainly rooted in its critique of commodifying black trauma, accusations of copying large elements of Jordan Peele’s political horrors and more particularly his horror film, Us, and even accusations of being a trailer copy of the Netflix horror film, His House. Audiences bought into the trailer’s narrative and set up expectations and views about the series before it was even released in its entirety, proving how trailers operate as their own narratives from which various levels of considerations and dissections can be made.
As genres of art, trailers also have their own cinematic conventions and features which allow for them to be read in generic ways like other forms of art, while also playing a fundamental role in the formation of film genres in the promotional, capitalist realm. Generic features of trailers include an introduction and concluding address, selected scenes in between that are emotionally charged or action driven displayed through montage, the revelation of significant characters, fast paced discontinuity editing, setting and possible structure. These elements combined create a smaller story constructed within the anticipatory dimension of capitalist realism of exaggerated spectacle. While these are generic and true of most trailers, trailer making and its accessibility has even expanded into the creation of “recut” trailers, typically made by audience members to subvert already known materials, not designed primarily to promote, but to entertain or purely humorous effect. This “recutting” process is made up of cutting and combining together materials from the original trailer predominantly through audio devices and choosing elements of the source trailer to amplify or omit, creating subverted genre and artistic practice. The recut trailer intends to be humorous in its playfulness with the form and meaning of the trailer outside of commercialization.
Trailers are not to be mistaken as mere vehicles advancing a story but are hybrid art forms that emerged from filmmaking. With their own features, forms, styles and generic elements, they capture audiences with their creativity, spectacle and curiosity.