ABSTRACT
Traditionally serving as the audience’s first point of contact with a film project, the theatrical trailer presents a spectacle of sight and sound that creates a visceral appeal while advertising a cinematic product. Trailers are studio-produced promotional texts that feature moving images, music, and voice from the promoted film in a highly condensed reworking. These “potent mini-epics” (GTA 2006) draw upon a variety of audiovisual advertising techniques to strategically attract audiences, exploiting “celebrity […], narrative content […], visual special effects, and soundtrack” (Deaville and Malkinson 2014: 122). In the sense of Tom Gunning’s “cinema of attractions” (Gunning 1986: 59), the trailer must negotiate the temporal divide between the past, present, and future, arousing anticipation and desire among potential audience members for the forthcoming film, yet grounded in the past and present. All of this must occur within the limit of approximately two-and-a-half minutes, in accordance with the requirement of the National Association of Theatre Owners and the Motion Picture Association of America (Losben 2011: 10). The trailer has to accomplish its work, moreover, without revealing too much or too little of the film’s narrative. Nevertheless, despite these limitations—or rather, within the framework of such parameters—the trailer “remains the most effective marketing piece” in the advertising portfolio of film studios (Smith 2011), a universally recognizable (short-)film genre of cinematic marketing. Because of its ubiquity within the experience of the cinema-going public and its centrality to the screen-promotion industry, the trailer and its music and sound merit closer attention, in their historical development and current state.
