Irina Proskurina
Pushkin Leningrad State University, Russia
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.