Watching the Trailer proudly presents: another guest blog post, this fortnight by Dr Kathleen Williams; welcome, thanks for joining us!
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Thousands of recut trailers have been uploaded to YouTube since its launch in 2005. Recut trailers typically involve the splicing together of footage from one or more filmic sources to create a trailer for a film – of a version of a film – that will not exist. They vary from the very popular (such as Scary Mary with over 14 million views), to those uploaded as part of an assignment that will not have an audience past their university professor (…and myself). There are technical tropes that recut creators use to classify their video as a trailer rather than a montage: voiceover, a classification screen (typically the Motion Picture Association of America), use of text, anticipatory language (‘coming soon’, ‘this summer’), and music. This campy 70s treatment of disaster film 2012 is a great example of these tropes in action:
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Thousands of recut trailers have been uploaded to YouTube since its launch in 2005. Recut trailers typically involve the splicing together of footage from one or more filmic sources to create a trailer for a film – of a version of a film – that will not exist. They vary from the very popular (such as Scary Mary with over 14 million views), to those uploaded as part of an assignment that will not have an audience past their university professor (…and myself). There are technical tropes that recut creators use to classify their video as a trailer rather than a montage: voiceover, a classification screen (typically the Motion Picture Association of America), use of text, anticipatory language (‘coming soon’, ‘this summer’), and music. This campy 70s treatment of disaster film 2012 is a great example of these tropes in action:
Recuts involve a kind of looking forward and looking back, a willingness to engage in anticipation for a future that can’t be obtained while also drawing upon cinematic memory and a general sense of pastness. In this post, I’m going to look at how trailers can act as a conduit for cinematic memory, a networked object through which to play with recollections of our past media consumption.
A great number of recut trailers are focused on altering our memories of a specific feature film. Ferris Club recuts footage from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Rather than being centred on extroverted Ferris’ antics, the trailer plays on the subtleties of Ferris’ best friend, Cameron. By reordering footage from the film, and amplifying certain elements, this recut uncovers the latent storyline of Ferris being a figment of Cameron’s imagination. It, of course, also places Ferris Bueller’s Day Off into the same narrative world as Fight Club.
A great number of recut trailers are focused on altering our memories of a specific feature film. Ferris Club recuts footage from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Rather than being centred on extroverted Ferris’ antics, the trailer plays on the subtleties of Ferris’ best friend, Cameron. By reordering footage from the film, and amplifying certain elements, this recut uncovers the latent storyline of Ferris being a figment of Cameron’s imagination. It, of course, also places Ferris Bueller’s Day Off into the same narrative world as Fight Club.
| | It subversively calls into question how we remember a specific film, showing that virtually any rereading is possible. It also requires us to draw upon what we understand Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to be (a cult teen film) and places it within the realm of a psychological thriller. Through editing we get to uncover what has always potentially been there. This can also be seen in trailers that recut a source film to exist within the world of |
Brokeback Mountain; a lingering glance between two heterosexual leads is reread as a latent romantic narrative.
| The most popular of recuts such as Scary Mary and The Shining Recut also demonstrate this through what Chuck Tryon calls “genre-shifting” (2009) rather than specifically reordering an existing film to align with the narrative of another. Scary Mary recuts children’s film Mary Poppins into a horror film, The Shining Recut transforms canonical thriller The Shining into a family comedy, and Must Love Jaws details the love story between a man and a shark. Clearly, part of the | |
humour and success of these trailers lies in upending the role of genre as a classifier; with some editing, children’s films can become the thing of nightmares, thrillers can be diluted into plane-friendly romps, and the sea cannot come between true love.
Another excellent example of this type of memory reordering is a series of “pre-makes” made by YouTube user whoiseyevan. Whoiseyevan recuts footage from a series of film to adhere to the narrative of a more contemporary film. ‘Premakes’ Ghostbusters 1954 is one such example, exploring what Ghostbusters would look like if it were shot in 1954 rather than 1984. The video mimics a generalised style of trailers in the 1950s, using text that asks questions of the audience, as well as re-casting the lead roles with iconic comedians of the 1940s and 1950s. Footage of Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin and Fred MacMurray from a suite of films is situated within the world of Ghostbusters.
| | These trailers demonstrate a complex temporal relationship to memory: on the one hand, they require us to revisit our knowledge of a recent past film such as Up! or Raiders of the Lost Ark, while also turning upon any knowledge the viewer may have of the older films being evoked. The pastness present in the recuts, spanning over several decades, is a mediated past that may not have been directly experienced. They playfully see the past in a new, playful and non-linear way. |
| What the multitude of recut trailers on YouTube demonstrate is not only a willingness to engage with cinematic memories, but also that there is a specific joy in revisiting our memories of a film through the form of a film trailer. We choose to play out these imaginary films through the rhetorical attractions of a trailer. With its anticipatory appeals (Kernan 2004), trailers seek to sell a film to an audience on the film’s potential – on what we can imagine between the | |
frames of the montage. By taking the misleading characteristics of trailers to their illogical excess, recut trailers simultaneously flatten out and accelerate cinematic history, ensuring that any film can be resurrected and made to appear again ‘this summer’.
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Kernan, Lisa 2004, Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Tryon, Chuck 2009, Reinventing cinema: Movies in the age of media convergence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Dr Kathleen Williams is a lecturer in media studies at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She recently completed her doctoral study on recut film trailers at the University of New South Wales in which she looked at recut trailers in relation to anticipation, nostalgia and networks. Her work on recuts appears in Transformative Works and Cultures, M/C Journal and edited collections. Her research is preoccupied with the ways that media technologies can be co-opted from their intended uses and technological nostalgia.
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Kernan, Lisa 2004, Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Tryon, Chuck 2009, Reinventing cinema: Movies in the age of media convergence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Dr Kathleen Williams is a lecturer in media studies at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She recently completed her doctoral study on recut film trailers at the University of New South Wales in which she looked at recut trailers in relation to anticipation, nostalgia and networks. Her work on recuts appears in Transformative Works and Cultures, M/C Journal and edited collections. Her research is preoccupied with the ways that media technologies can be co-opted from their intended uses and technological nostalgia.
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