Watching the Trailer is very excited to welcome Dr Jonathan Wroot, from the University of Worcester for this week's guest blog post. 

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Trailers and DVDs are often seen as promotional extra-texts that exist in relation to a specific film. However, such material is produced by specific industries and institutions. Therefore, should they not be discussed as individual media texts? This was the argument I made in a paper presented at the MeCCSA conference in January 2014 (see here). Evidence was taken from the actions of the UK distributor, Arrow Video, which will be the focus of this blog post. Theoretical concepts and interpretations were debated in the original paper. However, this post will mainly focus on the significant content within the Arrow Video Stories.

The first 'Arrow Video Story': Deadly Blessing

From 2013 onwards, Arrow has posted trailers online that coincided with its latest DVD and Blu-Ray re-releases. The first was for Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing (1981). These were not just trailers for the films (which range from Black Sabbath (1963) to Blow Out (1981)), as they also detailed the new content on each DVD release (such as the film’s picture quality, packaging for the disc, and newly recorded interviews with the cast and crew). Moreover, the trailers are categorised as part of the “Arrow Video Story”, and so do not simply act as advertising for the latest ancillary products related to specific films. These trailers are emphasised as individual texts to be watched both individually and as part of a particular distributor’s activities. They also emphasise the DVDs as new texts to be enjoyed. Therefore, if distribution companies are treating ancillary material, such as trailers and DVDs, as singular media texts, academic research should do the same.

The majority of Arrow Film’s releases, especially throughout 2013, have been as part of the Arrow Video sub-label. The extent of this section of Arrow’s operations can be seen on its website – where the label's site claims it ‘brings you the best cult films in deluxe editions with newly commissioned artwork, specially curated extras and booklets. Arrow Video editions take in genre staples like Italian horror, grindhouse classics, and much more…’ (take a look here). 

The Arrow Video sub-label page is the only Arrow webpage divided up into genres, as well as certain directors and countries. These releases are also often available on both Blu-Ray and DVD – and each case is elaborately designed, showing that they do not only have a multitude of extras, but also various collectible items and artwork within the packaging. Arrow do not just see these releases as only appealing to a niche market as luxury items. DVDs with a reduced amount of extras and artwork are also as part of another sub-label, ArrowDrome, where titles are allocated colours according to their genre.

Arrow Video markets its releases through its unique trailers which are classified as part of the ‘Arrow Video Story’, and are posted on the Arrow Video YouTube channel shortly before a title’s UK release – as well as through Facebook and Twitter. These sorts of trailers do not exist for other Arrow Films titles or the ArrowDrome re-releases. The Arrow Video Story trailers advertise the film, but only as one ‘chapter’ within its short running time. The second chapter briefly gives an overview of the extra content that the disc includes – which is often newly made or never seen before – whereas the third details the packaging that the disc comes in. Most of the Arrow Video Stories are no longer than 90 seconds, and can all be found on this YouTube playlist.

(Below: Knightriders - The Arrow Video Story)

Here, the DVDs are presented as new editions of the films – in that Arrow Video is presenting these releases as new experiences for consumers to enjoy – and not just a new way of viewing a particular film. There is a bit more going on as well. The trailers are classified as part of the Arrow Video Story – which could mean the label’s overall view of its own actions, but this classification does not feature on the Arrow Video packaging. The phrase Arrow Video Story is only attached to the trailers for the DVD releases that are posted on the distributor’s YouTube channel.

I believe that this phrasing of the Arrow Video trailers shows that the label wants to catalogue its trailers as comprehensively as its DVD collection. In the past, Arrow Video did release extensive catalogues of its releases – and they could be requested by post, or downloaded as a PDF of the website. Now, its website has been radically updated to reflect the categories that were contained in its printed catalogues. In addition, there have been 61 Arrow Video Stories released to date on YouTube.

The trailers are not just being used as a means of promoting these DVD releases, but they are also being made available as a new experience for UK media consumers and web browsers. Just through viewing the Arrow Video stories on YouTube, viewers can get a sense of the film’s history as well as reasoning behind Arrow’s treatment of the film (e.g. this could just be because of a film’s cult status, though allusions are also made to positive critical reception and commercial success, where relevant). For instance, take the Chapter Two section of the Arrow Video Story for Big Trouble In Little China (1986). Many comments from the cast and crew illustrate how they thought the film had a great script, but this feeling was not shared by the studio executives and producers. It is now regarded as a film that was ahead of its time in the use of visual effects, as well as trampolines and wire-work for its stunts.

(Below: Big Trouble in Little China)

Arrow are treating their DVD re-releases of films as separate media experiences compared to whatever has come before. The trailers not only reinforce this, but are an important experience themselves. Arrow wishes to use them to chart its continuing story in the UK home media market. To briefly refer to the full conclusions of my original paper, paratexts and similar terms are useful for categorising promotional and ancillary materials related to film and media. However, the actions of Arrow and other companies can illustrate how these materials can be consumed and interacted with independently of the “central” text. Therefore, it may be more useful to use or adapt conceptual terms such as intertexts. This is in contrast to paratexts, which suggest a certain hierarchy between films and their ancillary materials. Trailers are becoming more prevalent in today’s media culture, and the concepts used to describe their behaviour need to reflect this.

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Jonathan Wroot, University of Worcester

Dr Jonathan Wroot is a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Worcester. He has taught classes on introductory film history and theoretical concepts; audience research; cult cinema; film reviewing; and documentary cinema. His PhD research concerns the distribution and marketing of Japanese films on DVD in the UK. Several articles derived from this work will be appearing throughout 2015. Further to these developments, Jonathan will be editing the intended publication for the collected papers of “Distributors, Discs and Disciples: Exploring the Home Media Renaissance”. Another research project on the Zatoichi film franchise is currently in development. Jonathan has presented at several conferences in London, Bournemouth, Manchester, Coventry, and St Andrews. His research on Arrow Video is also intended to be a subject within a future monograph.

[We're delighted to share a post from our friend and colleague, Dr. Enrica Picarelli, an Italian scholar currently at the Centre for Comparative Studies, Lisbon University. Her blog is Space of Attraction and eminently worth reading. This piece is both longer than our typical post and slightly more theoretical in scope and academic in jargon. The terms haptic/hapticity will be, perhaps, unfamiliar, but they are great words to know, referring as they do to the sense of touch or tactile experience and ways of "feeling" the visual. ]  



Last February, the art collective Nest, based in Nairobi, released To Catch a Dream {click here to see the Vimeo video}, a 13-minute collaborative fashion film featuring Vivienne Westwood’s muse Ajuma Nasenyana and a team of award-winning stylists from Kenya, including Namnyak Odupoy, Ami Doshi, Kepha Maina, Jamil and Azra Walji, Katungulu Mwendwa, Ann McCreath and Adele Dejak. Jim Chuchu, whose work on Kenya’s LGBT community has been screened to acclaim at festivals worldwide (Voulrias 2014), directed; Wangechi Ngugi produced. Because of its high production values and cast of acclaimed artists, the online release of To Catch a Dream was widely anticipated, mentioned, shared, and positively reviewed in lifestyle publications and social media.

To Catch a Dream is an exploration of withdrawal, desire and death focusing on a young widow in mourning, haunted by the memory of her husband. Every night he appears in her dreams, until the exhausted protagonist decides to chase his ghost with a dream-catcher.  Crossing dimensions in her sleep, she travels across the land of the dead for one last encounter with her love and other otherworldly entities. Ultimately, the encounter proves fatal and she is trapped in death’s dreamworld. 

I consider To Catch a Dream in this post because its production values, aim, and effects attest to the transformations of promotional forms in the 2.0 environment and to the difficulties scholars have defining, and therefore delimiting, the scope and properties of discreet advertising formats. In a review, journalist Diana Opoti asks whether to label To Catch a Dream “an ad campaign” or a “fashion film” (2015). Her hesitation stems from the fact that, as happens with many promotional formats, the immediate commercial aim of the feature – the showcasing of apparel by renowned designers – is somehow eschewed. Audiences interested in learning about the garments displayed on screen have either to wait for the credits, scan the promotional poster or rely on external information, such as reviews or the cast’s press statements. The primary goal of the production is, in fact, to engross viewers in an unfolding narrative. Sunny Dolat, stylist and fashion director, notes that the garments “reflect the different phases of the widow’s journey through the dreamworld,” thereby elevating the narrative element above the aestheticized displaying of apparel for commercial purposes (UpNairobi 2015).

This instrumental use of clothes and accessories allows Nest to address place-based and culture-specific issues in a story-driven audiovisual project. Dolat continues:

Ajuma's red, slim cut Dream Country ensemble, with black detailing, detachable leather sleeves and their flowing chiffon extensions was intentionally designed to evoke the memory of bridal wear. Another character, the Air Guide, wears a piece showing strong elemental references. The opulent peacock feather neckpiece and voluminous loops of sheer cloth celebrate desert breezes with each of Air Guide's motions (Opoti 2015) 

Fashion, in this instance, becomes character, contributing to the weaving of a storyworld about “our disquieting modern identities, re-imagining our pasts and inhabiting mythical African futures” (Nest). In concert with the choice to shoot the dreamworld among the iconic landmarks of Magadi and Lake Naivasha and to have the characters speak in local languages (Dholuo, Swahili, Kikamba, Sheng, Tigrinya, Kimeru and Turkana), To Catch a Dream creates an atmospheric spectacle that attracts for a number of reasons. Among these is the intention to root the commercial concerns of the eight stylists in a project devoted to exploring “layers of how Africans are seen and unseen” (Nest). The project’s potential lies as well in its execution, where artistic vision incorporates elements of various genres, including fantasy, gothic, costume photography, and cinematographic teaser/trailers.

To Catch a Dream exemplifies the role of the fashion industry in pushing the boundaries of advertising and commercial formats. Fashion films have more and more become crossbreeds of different promotional genres. They borrow conventions from trailers, documentaries, teasers, video-art, and film proper, while preserving a formal autonomy that makes them a successful means of consumer attraction. Nest co-founder George Gachara explains that To Catch a Dream was developed as an experimental fashion intervention and short film, designed to provide a medium for the creation and sharing of fashion experiences, products and knowledge. It embeds fashion in an evocative spectacle where atmosphere –the lived or screen-mediated experience of a culture and location (East African & Kenya) that are both exotic and uncannily familiar – constitutes the main source of value. 

As in the case studies Marketa Uhlirova analyzes in her work on fashion films, a “synergy” forms between film effect and fashion effect, whereby sensorial persuasion and illusion address the viewer as both spectator and potential buyer (2013:122).  The phenomenological state thus achieved is analogous to the spectatorial pleasures associated with the cinema of attraction, based on the simultaneous experience of defamiliarization and the acquisition of new knowledge. Fashion film “extend[s] the properties of physical garments into new mental spaces where experimental effects of impressionistic and poetic cinema play a significant role – as do the qualities of sound and rhythm,” she proposes. (2013:123). 

Montage is, obviously, the principal mechanism behind the creation of the mental space of illusion and persuasion that entices media users as actual viewers and consumers. Borrowing from Laura Mark’s study, Gary Needham refers to the “haptic” aesthetic of fashion films, where cinematic conventions like close-up and slow motion combine with diegetic and non-diegetic sound editing to deliver the impression of materiality (2013:108). To Catch a Dream follows a cinematic model, investing in soundtrack and narrative rhythm to establish anticipation and induce deferral. These affects mark the escapism of both the filmic and the spectactorial (consumer) experience. 

Consequently, this film oscillates between narrative closure and the postponement of the pleasure of wearing, touching or buying the garments displayed on screen. Indeed, it promotes the imaginative act of coming in contact with the material referents of the filmed objects as well as with the extended narrative universe that we only glimpse in the film.  It is here that To Catch a Dream borrows most notably from the experience of watching a trailer. 

The fashion film, in fact, operates in line with the “anticipatory consciousness” that Lisa Kernan ascribes to trailer spectatorship, whereby “trailers are what we imagine – and hope – the films to become; the films they promote are thus ever richer in the imagined interstices of the paradoxical trailer montage than they can ever be in their narrative ‘fullness’ on the screen” (2004:210). Since trailers “hover in the consciousness of the viewer as incomplete, unformed ‘ideas’”, they can be viewed as a “hopeful beginning” whose success plays on the constant deferral of pleasure (2004:210). Similarly, shorts films that promote fashion garments through audiovisual narrative set in place a universe that demands the viewer’s investment in the fiction, bringing it to life through the literal embodiment of its elements.

To Catch a Dream exemplifies a genre of productions that exploit the style and persuasive power of costume in movement, along with the editing and narrative conventions of mainstream cinema, to redefine our understanding of commercial promotion and artistic practice. This ever-evolving hybrid of aesthetic forms, “sit[ting] somewhere on the margins of conventional advertising” (Uhlirova 2013:121), invites us to consider and systematize how to look at fashion and what to take from this engagement with identification and point of view.   

 

Bibliography

Kernan, L. (2004), Coming attractions: Reading American movie trailers. University of Texas Press.

Needham, G. (2013), ‘The Digital Fashion Film’ in Bruzzi, Stella, and Pamela Church Gibson, eds. Fashion cultures: theories, explorations and analysis. Routledge.

Nest, ‘The Nest’, Nest. http://www.thisisthenest.com/about/ 

Opoti, D. (2015), ‘Kenya: When Fashion Meet Film’, The Star, 20 February http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/where-fashion-meet-film 

 Nest, (2015), ‘To Catch a Dream’, Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/116848487

Uhlirova, M. (2013), ‘The fashion Film Effect’ in Bartlett, Djurdja, Shaun Cole, and Agnès Rocamora, eds. Fashion Media: Past and Present. A&C Black.

UpNairobi (2015), ‘Film Review: To Catch a Dream’, Up Nairobi, 24 February. http://www.upnairobi.com/dt_portfolio/film-review-to-catch-a-dream/  

Voulrias, C. (2014), ‘Kenyan film tells stories of LGBT lives’, Al Jazeera America, 5 September. http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2014/9/5/kenyan-film-tellsstoriesoflgbtlives.html

With apologies for a later than usual post, we must open with a massive "Merci Montréal!" 

We're freshly back (and a little jetlagged) from Canada where the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) hosted a supremely awesome conference. Running from the 25th-29th March, the conference was not only a wonderful opportunity to network as a team and individually but a great chance to hear some of the finest media scholars in the world speak. 
Full details of the conference line up and speakers can be found here.

The highlights included (but are by no means limited to); Tessa Idlewine and Cassie Blake present a fascinating paper on the (largely absent) role of the female voice over in trailers, a wonderful panel on the future directions for dvertising research, and of  course a Watching the Trailer Panel alongside colleagues with the Trailaurality Project.

While we digest some of our intellectual stimuli, and take on board the criticism, compliments and general guidance of our peers, we'd like to offer a snapshot into the life of an academic at SCMS. First up, Keith M. Johnston opened our Panel Historicising the role of the audience response in the trailer...

Next up came Ed Vollans' paper on the role of audience research from an empirical perspective...

Fred Greene's paper followed looking at the attitudes to the trailer from the audiences  (with images to be added soon...t the moment he's just phoning it in).

Watching the Trailer panellists aside of course, we managed to hang out with the wonderful Cassie and Tessa from The Academy.

Work aside though, the conference venue was fantastic and allowed the opportunity of a little sightseeing and sampling of the local cuisine and culture.

Cathédrale Marie-Reine du Monde (above) was opposite the Conference venue - check out the view from the Conference hotel, while (below) Notre Dame Cathedral was a short trek away situated in Old Montréal.

Old Montréal was a great blend of old and new...

that allowed at least one of us to sample some of the culinary delights...

While the Cafe in question may have hosted a particularly vocal debate surrounding the role of the narrator in the trailer alas it was mostly work...and we were watched closely (much to our horror, appearing on the SCMS screens)...