if movies, linear narration, hollywood fare i mean, are like novels then movie trailers are like poems. trailers are short, episodic bursts of sound, image and emotion. often trailers are the only interesting things about movies. sometimes they surpass in intensity the films they are meant to illuminate. always the moments spent in a movie theater with a sequence of trailers playing onscreen is a rush to the head and senses. like poems these shorts work in an interior logic, they cannot by their nature tell the whole story, only gloss that story. anyway, storytelling is for the full-length feature. trailers are composed of truncated scenes delineated like lines in poems. or short chunks of prose. if it is a comedy then the trailer is a burst of humor. if it is a horror film then the trailer is a series of images and atmosphere to invoke dread.

most often i will watch a film's trailer a hundred times to the one viewing of the film. in my collection i have several discs of just trailers. my favorites are something weird video's sampler and the kung fu trailer show. holy shit, they's good!

when i get a disc of a film the first thing i watch is the trailer. there are two kinds of trailers, the teaser, and the full-length. the teaser is just about 30 seconds to roughly a minute's worth of images to get the viewer salivating for the feature. sometimes the teaser is the most beautiful piece of film made in relation to that feature. anyway, dvds usually now come, as part of the extras portion, with both types of trailer along with tv and radio ads. but it is sometimes the teaser, like the short bursts of fragments by sappho, that have the most vivid memories.

for example, i remember seeing the teaser for ridley scott's gothic horror alien. at least i think i remember it. for the discs i've watched and what i've found online do not corroborate my memories. what the fuck. i recall the strange siren-like music punctuating an empty screen of blackness. then the camera pans down the frame to a leathery-like egg sitting on a dehydrated expanse of soil. the egg splits just a hair and a green light, like a laser, points up out of the frame. while the siren-like track increases its beat. then, in tiny script, are the words 'in space no one can hear you scream'. i've not found that version anywhere. more than likely, my memory elided the teaser past the images of the crew fighting something off-screen. nevertheless, that teaser was the first to royally scare the shit out of me. i don't know who directed it, but it was good, and it had me salivating for the feature film.

i've spent a life living in trailers.