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Across the political spectrum and ranging from professionally produced campaign ads to grass-roots style activist videos, the movie trailer has become a template for political advertising. Based on an historical analysis of movie trailers, this presentation will discuss a number of current examples of political ads using the trailer template. The presentation will raise questions about the cultural salience of the trailer format and address what we may call its bi-partisan political affordances.
Vinzenz Hediger is professor of Cinema Studies at Goethe Universität Frankfurt, where he directs the Graduiertenkolleg/Graduate Research Training Program Configurations of Film. His publications include Films That Work. Industrial Cinema and the Productivity of Media (with Patrick Vomderau, Amsterdam UP 2009), Nostalgia for the Coming Attraction. American Movie Trailers and the Culture of FilmConsumption (Columbia University Press, forthcoming) and Films That Work Harder. The Circulations of Industrial Cinema (with Florian Hoof and Yvonne Zimmermann, forthcoming from Amsterdam UP). He is a co-founder of NECS – European Network of Cinema and Media Studies (www.necs.org), a Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence The Formation of Normative Orders and a member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature.
This talk is organized in conjunction with the Media History Research Centre, and in dialogue with the symposium Playback: Genealogies of Interactivity.