At a time of uncertainty over film and television texts being transferred online and on to portable media players, this article examines one of the few visual texts that exist comfortably on multiple screen technologies: the trailer. Adopted as an early cross-media text, the trailer now sits across cinema, television, home video, the internet, games consoles, mobile phones and iPods. Exploring the aesthetic and structural changes the trailer has undergone in its journey from the cinema to the iPod screen, the article focuses on the new mobility of these trailers, the shrinking screen size, and how audience participation with these texts has influenced both trailer production and distribution techniques. Exploring these texts, and their technological display, reveals how modern distribution techniques have created a shifting and interactive relationship between film studio and audience. Key Words / aesthetics / film promotion / internet / iPod / technology / trailer / videophoneIn the current atmosphere of uncertainty over how film and television programmes are made available both online and to mobile media players, this article will focus on a visual text that regularly moves between the multiple screens of cinema, television, computer and mobile phone: the film trailer. A unique text that has often been overlooked in studies of film and media, trailer analysis reveals new approaches to traditional concerns such as stardom, genre and narrative, and engages in more recent debates on interactivity and textual mobility. 'Film' trailer is itself a disingenuous term: although it has been described as a 'brief film text . . . created for the purpose of projecting in theatres to promote a film's theatrical release ' (Kernan, 2004: 1), reducing trailers to a purely theatrical concept limits our perception of what trailers are, what they can mean, who they target, and why we should be interested in them. The trailer grew beyond the borders of the cinema screen over 50 years ago, when 1950s television trailers for new film releases demonstrated the ability of the trailer format to move between visual media. Since then, the trailer has been transferred onto the various iterations of home video -from VHS to
Recent debates about the role of 3-D within cinema (and other media) have contained the traces of a largely anti-stereoscopic agenda that can be traced back to critical responses to 3-D in the 1950s. This article considers how British film reviews from the 1950s and 1980s established potent terms of discussion around the 3-D technology, its potential aesthetic development, and the role of stereoscopy within cinema. Exploring the parameters that the original reviewers set in place concerning the 3-D aesthetic, notably claims around realism, novelty, and gimmickry, the article argues that the language and terms of 1950s British film reviewers have worked to set an agenda that resonates through both the 1980s 3-D revival and modern day digital 3-D. Given those elements have defined the anti-stereoscopic agenda that has developed over the last six decades, this article will explore the foundations of that agenda through analysis of the main arguments and opinions expressed by British film critics in the 1950s, and the return (and re-emphasis) of those opinions in the 1980s 3-D revival. These moments of 'agenda-setting' in popular criticism will be shown to have defined 3-D as a novelty technology, not a source of art or creativity, a language that continues to recur in the modern period. 4 The focus on a technological subject is a departure from those reception studies that focus on specific films, genres or directors, allowing the article to consider the role of British film reviewers, cultural critics and industry commentators in creating and reinforcing a particular agenda around 3-D technology. 5 To paraphrase Barbara Klinger, the value in analysing film reviews (and 3 reviewers) lies in establishing how language is mobilised to define and contain film technology in the wider culture; producing rhetoric that helps 'to establish the terms of discussion and debate.' 6 Moving from a specific film to a film technology, however, creates unique problems for the analysis of historical discourse, as such technologies have often been often overlooked in favour of more traditional tenets of film reviews such as 'plot and character, or regarded as a vulgar necessity in critical debates about motion picture art and popular culture, 7 The rare times when technology has been heralded, the focus has been on the possible enhancements it can offer to realism or audience immersion. 8 As this article will demonstrate, critical responses to the introduction and resurgence of 3-D have moved between these different camps, as
This article considers the place of women's amateur film within regional and national film archive holdings through a specific case study of the 'Women Amateur Filmmakers in Britain' project at the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA). Reflecting on the process of cataloguing and presenting this collection, the article will explore the challenges of making women's creative filmed work visible, suggesting that women's amateur films exist at a crucial overlap of archival oversight and cultural stigma. We argue that prevailing associations of archive film with space, place and location could prevent feminist-led projects from gaining traction in the contested world of exhibition where locality often overshadows other thematic or stylistic approaches. We argue that only by reconsidering the types of films that are prioritised for preservation and presentation can women's films be made fully visible.
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