Today movie trailer is an artistic genre balancing on the edge of cinema, packaging design and advertising business. In this unique art form visual information can be viewed as a text whose meanings are apophatic and “read” on the basis of interpreting enigmatic images with the help of cultural and artistic associations.
At first glance, the age-old history of a trailer — a “herald” of a forthcoming film — has not altered either its functions (advertising and informational) or its objective (financial). But is actually this true?
During its century-long history trailer has evolved from a preview dominated by the text and meant to “sell” the actors starring in the film to the special work of a director with a laconic formulation of a message of the film.
Analysis of stages of a movie trailer development, in course of which its styles, techniques and meaning were changed, demonstrates that it eventually evolved into a product of web-design and cinema and a sort of ontological frontier of cinema narrative, beyond which a viewer loses a psycho-­emotional capacity of logical perception of a visual image.
However, any text, including that of a trailer, in order to be a text should contain meanings, acting necessarily in a system that is defined by a certain type of a worldview. In my opinion, a fundamental form of transmission of meanings for cinema is hypermyth. Though this is a recent phenomenon in culture, it is the result of centuries of transformation of a traditional myth reflected in various art forms. The report traces main stages of transformation of a traditional myth (neomyth, hypermyth), as well as mechanisms of constructing cinematic meanings by means of hypermyth. Being a genre of hyperreality a trailer is apophatic by its very nature as it is based not on narrative logic, but on configuration of a hypermyth.
Thanks to the rapid spread of new technologies and programs to create trailers in the last ten years this form of cinema art has become a form of mass video creativity. Movie trailers, which originally emerged as a “virtual package” and a financial motivator, have become a form of digital folklore, with all the specific features of folk art.

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