Music and the Formal Structures of Contemporary Action Film Trailers

Abstract

Music and sound are key to creating film trailers that are coherent pieces of media because the visual and narrative content is so fragmented in trailers. Deaville and Malkinson note that sync points “tend to occur with greater frequency in trailers than in narrative films” (Chion, 1994). This chapter develops this claim further: Not only are sync points more frequent in trailers than in narrative films, but also they more commonly extend to small-scale characteristics such as the beat and rhythm of the music. Using a corpus of fifty contemporary action film trailers, this chapter demonstrates the integral role of “tightly organized synchronization” (Watts, 2018) in unifying and organizing a trailer’s materials into a compact audiovisual experience, as well as outlining common trailer structures. This work begins to unpack the relationship between music, narrative, and spectacle that is imperative to understanding how contemporary trailers go beyond promoting and previewing the feature film.