Then there is the trailer for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1969), which runs only 45 seconds but nevertheless manages to pack in 54 shots, some of them just two frames in length. Even a seemingly unambitious trailer, such as that for The Gingerbread Man (Robert Altman, 1997), plays structural games which will not be apparent to anyone unfamiliar with Robert Altman’s film: a cop’s angry recollection of how lawyer Kenneth Branagh destroyed a fellow officer (“You put that guy up on the stand, you punched holes in a twenty-year career”) is juxtaposed with Branagh’s courtroom interrogation of Tom Berenger, making it seem as if the cop is referring to the latter event (and thus bringing to the surface one of this underrated film’s motifs – the impossibility of escaping the past). Life Wastes Andy Hardy), Rene Vienet ( La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques?), Maurice Lemaitre ( Positif-Negatif, Notre Film), Sergei Komarov ( The Kiss Of Mary Pickford), Orson Welles ( F For Fake), Woody Allen ( What’s Up, Tiger Lily?), Jean-Luc Godard ( Histoire(s) Du Cinema), Kirk Tougas (whose The Politics Of Perception itself draws on a trailer) and Dusan Makavejev. Examined more closely, the use many trailers make of the material available to them is not far removed from the formal experiments carried out by such ‘found footage’ filmmakers as Martin Arnold ( Alone. And yet the assumption remains that a trailer is something ephemeral, to be disposed of once the primary text – the actual film – becomes available. This moment can be found not in Howard Hawks’ 1959 masterpiece Rio Bravo, but rather in that film’s trailer, a two-minute gem not listed in any Hawks filmography, although it was almost certainly directed by Hawks himself.Īll of us, I think, love trailers, with their promises of pleasures yet to come, their tantalising glimpses of new works by favourite auteurs. “Tell ’em about Ricky Nelson” demands an off-screen Martin, and Nelson obligingly adds “Oh, yeah, and that’s me. With John Wayne, Dean Martin and Walter Brennan. But this time, something else happens: like Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley) in Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1982), Colorado turns towards the camera and directly addresses the viewer, insisting “This has been one of the few peaceful scenes in the picture Rio Bravo. Y’wanna play some more? Why don’t you play something I can sing with you?” and the group will launch into ‘Cindy’. We know what comes next – Stumpy will smile and say “That was real pretty. Colorado and Dude are singing ‘My Rifle, My Pony and Me’ while Stumpy accompanies them on a harmonica. To a cinephile, the scene is familiar – like a treasured childhood memory or a house where one has lived for many years.

Above suspicion 1995 trailer