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(More customer reviews)No matter whether you're a film professor, film industry professional, or just plain moviegoer, you'll never look at a trailer (movie preview) the same after reading this book. Written with academic rigor and thoroughness, it explains how previews came to referred to as trailers and analyzes trailers for their intended affect, subtext, and demographic. The book follows the author's passion for examining " the hypothetical spectator that can be read within the trailer texts themselves: an "audience study" who can read through the looking glass of the Hollywood film industry." She submits case studies of some 30 trailers, from Casablanca to Paper Moon to Air Force One, dividing them into three eras. By the end of the book you'll really appreciate these free mini-movie/commercials that we all alternately enjoy and hate yet use to decide whether to see a movie or not.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers (Texas Film and Media)
Movie trailers--those previews of coming attractions before the start of a feature film--are routinely praised and reviled by moviegoers and film critics alike: "They give away too much of the movie." "They're better than the films." "They only show the spectacular parts." "They lie." "They're the best part of going to the movies." But whether you love them or hate them, trailers always serve their purpose of offering free samples of a film to influence moviegoing decision-making. Indeed, with their inclusion on videotapes, DVDs, and on the Internet, trailers are more widely seen and influential now than at any time in their history.
Starting from the premise that movie trailers can be considered a film genre, this pioneering book explores the genre's conventions and offers a primer for reading the rhetoric of movie trailers. Lisa Kernan identifies three principal rhetorical strategies that structure trailers: appeals to audience interest in film genres, stories, and/or stars. She also analyzes the trailers for twenty-seven popular Hollywood films from the classical, transitional, and contemporary eras, exploring what the rhetorical appeals within these trailers reveal about Hollywood's changing conceptions of the moviegoing audience. Kernan argues that movie trailers constitute a long-standing hybrid of advertising and cinema and, as such, are precursors to today's heavily commercialized cultural forms in which art and marketing become increasingly indistinguishable.
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