Remixing Movies and Trailers Before and After the Digital Age

Up to the late 1990s, the primary purpose of the movie trailer was to give audiences a taste of the pie, the film, in order to encourage them to view the complete feature at the theater. I assume that a good movie trailer works 'like a translation' in its attempt to raise in its audience effects of meaning similar to those expected by the movie in its specific text organization. To check if this is still true for trailers made in the time of the participatory web, I will discuss some new practices in movie consumption, exploring the so-called 'sweded' short self-made remakes and some typologies of 'remix trailers' (i.e. mashup trailers, genre remix, kinetic typography, fake trailers, and so on). I will argue that these new digital trailers of the DIY age deeply transform the meanings and forms of the source movie through a rewriting operation and a creative reformulation. Through the dissemination on video and social sharing websites remix trailers use the logic of repetition as a means of supporting a logic of innovative reinterpretation.