The Art of the Trailer
By Lilah Cardillo
I am an absolute fool for a good movie trailer.
Maybe it has something to do with my generation’s affinity for short-form video and snappy editing. I’m sure my faltering attention span is part of the reason a trailer can get me more inspired than an entire movie at times. The artistic value of the movie trailer is not to be understated—It is my firm belief that trailers make or break a film’s earnings. Of all the marketing and propaganda that floods our collective consciousness, film trailers are the most intriguing, and dare I add, by far the most beautiful.
The first movie trailer was actually made of recorded clips of the Broadway play The Pleasure Seekers, but the value of this specific marketing niche was soon realized. While at first trailers were a private pursuit on the part of studios, the creation of the National Screen Service in 1919 outsourced the work. Then-unknown directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick started cutting their own trailers, and soon enough short films and trailers for upcoming movies were a common appetizer in theaters everywhere. Trailers did a job, and they did it well. Advertisers picked up on them early on, putting trailers on blast before a movie's release in order to dominate the attention of the consumer.
I hate ads. Advertising as an industry is bewildering, frightening, and almost eldritch in its power over the modern human mind. But movie trailers interrupting my Youtube Video have more than once delayed me in hitting skip. For instance, the trailer for last year’s viral shock-fest Saltburn sent me down a rabbit hole of video essays and cast interviews with its stark primary-colored script and tantalizing clips—showing just enough to intrigue, while keeping all else under a veil of mystery. Every good movie trailer should be seductive in this way. It has to make you care about the stories of the faces being flashed at you and the context of the snappy quotes it allows you to hear. I never saw Saltburn. But it remains ripe in my mind as an unbitten fruit.
On the other hand, a trailer can fail a movie just as easily as it can support it. On the other end of the spectrum, Disney’s box-office late bloomer Elemental was advertised as a slightly funny romance for the whole family. Plus, its trailers provided more of a plot summary than anything—the last thing a trailer should be is a mini version of a feature film. One of my writing instructors, Creative Writing veteran Azar Kohzadi, led an eye-opening cinemapoetics unit last year. The combination of film and poetry that class provided was a lot of fun, but what stuck with me the most was our class's deep dive into the nature of a good trailer. Azar told us, simply, that a trailer is a poem—it’s the greatest emotions of its parent film artfully distilled into a whirlwind couple of minutes. If a movie is a novel, a trailer is a sonnet, rather than the blurb on the back. That titration of feeling, the paring down of details and allowing expectation to guide the viewer’s mind, is the key to making a good art piece great. I find inspiration every time I step foot in a movie theater. Hopefully, as the changing world requires more artists than ever, others can too.