A while ago, I may have shared that my all-time favourite movie trailer was the teaser to the 1979 film Prophesy. Since then, I've flushed out the one trailer that might possibly succeed in topping it in my affections - a modest little trailer for a fairly obscure picture, tucked away where few are likely to discover it, so naturally it felt like a real find. I speak of the teaser for the 1992 film Timescape (released in some markets under the alternate title Grand Tour: A Disaster In Time). The contents of the teaser in question? Nothing, more or less. By that, I don't mean that it divulges only the most minimal story details for the picture it's seeking to establish in the public awareness, a practice not at all uncommon for early trailers put together while production is still underway and there is only limited footage for them to work with (although that also applies). The Timescape trailer is on a level unto itself. I'm not sure I've ever seen a teaser so weirdly fixated with dead space; so aggressively intent upon turning nothing into an art form.
I have no idea if this trailer ever saw the theatrical light of day, but you can find it on at least two UK rental releases put out by Virgin Video in 1991 - Mermaids (for my thoughts on the movie itself, go here) and After Dark, My Sweet. It tells us absolutely nothing about the plot of the then-upcoming Jeff Daniels project - except that it starred Jeff Daniels, who had recently appeared in a popular pic involving killer spiders, and that it came from the "creator" (in this case, to mean screenwriter) of the 1989 film Warlock (David Twohy, although he isn't mentioned by name). From the title of the film, you might have accurately guessed that it was a science fiction picture of sorts. But otherwise we have zilch to go off. No flashy title animation, no stirring voice-over narration to tell us something of the plight of Daniels' character and whatever he's going through, just a small succession of white and red titles against a black screen, passively dissolving into one another in complete and utter silence. There's not even a memorable tagline at the end to give the promo a stamp of narrative direction or individual character. It was content to let emptiness do the talking. I'm going to hazard a guess that the frugality of the promo was born more of necessity than of any particular artistic strategy - that the production had yielded very little usable footage at the time they were tasked with creating a promo, and had possibly not much of a budget to boot - but what can I say, it worked like a charm on me. Immediately, I was gripped by the compulsion to learn more about Timescape. While a part of me was inclined to poke fun at the trailer (affectionately so) for how unrelentingly barebones it was, overall that spartan approach spoke less of a lack of substance than of mystery and intrigue - the pitch black titles a blank canvas of seemingly infinite possibilities. More importantly still, they were a quagmire of existential dread, the blackness and the silence becoming voids in which it seemed as though something should be revealing itself, but was refusing to do so. To watch the Timescape teaser was to be plunged into a twenty-nine second vacuum, where the absence of any visual or audio signifiers on which to hang your comprehension leaves you with the distinct feeling of having been stranded far from anything familiar or discernible. It is a tremendously eerie experience. I came away with the gut impression that this communicated far more about the character of the feature in question than a more conventional barrage of images and rapid-fire edits possibly could.
...So much so that I figured the film itself could only disappoint me, once I'd gotten hold of a copy (as Prophesy ultimately did). Happy to report, then, that I actually really enjoyed Timescape the film, although I'll reserve my thoughts on it for its own post later down the line. This one can stand as a celebration of the Timescape teaser on its own.
Overall, I think my fascination with the Timescape trailer stems from the fact that it is such a perfect trailer for the VHS format. As any child of the magnetic tape era well knows, whatever content you had willfully rooted out on VHS invariably lay between two deeply ominous spaces, typically characterised by long stretches of blackness, and punctuated by random snippets of inexplicablity. Putting on a much-loved feature meant first having to navigate a wilderness of fear-inducing logos, discombobulating promos and unsettling copyright notices that could not be bypassed at the simple press of a button, merely trawled through. Even if you hit the fast forward button, you still had to contend with the knowledge that it was still lying there and waiting. Reaching the end of the main attraction meant, invariably, being dragged right back into the great black void, if you weren't savvy enough to hit the Stop button on your remote in time. Compared to the disc experience, which typically returned you to the comforting locus of the interactive menu, or the streaming experience, which brassily tries to drag you out the instant the credits have begun into whatever else it insists you should be watching (speaking as one of those strange individuals who actually enjoys watching end-credits, I had a very bad experience with a recent viewing of Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, which has only decreased the prospects of détente between myself and Netflix), VHS was the format of the memento mori. The Timescape teaser was right at home amid all that sickening vastness, where the only sound more ominous than complete and utter silence was the sound of tape hiss working its cackling magic.
Discovering the Timescape teaser on the Mermaids ex-rental was an especially bewildering experience, though, for what it's immediately followed by. The first time I saw it, I fully expected the teaser to just be an extended intro, followed by a more conventional preview; hence, when I suddenly found myself slap-bang in the middle of a tropical island paradise (a sensory discord if ever there was one), for just a second or so I was seriously wondering if this was a glimpse into what Timescape had to offer. If so, then it would absolutely not have been what I was expecting. The voice-over narration addressing Auntie Beryl and next door's budgie with a thick London accent (coupled with the non-threatening smooth jazz backing track) clued me in that this likely had nothing to do with the aforementioned Jeff Daniels flick from the creator of Warlock, and yet I'd be lying if I said that the unease I'd garnered from watching the preceding preview didn't bleed over into my digestion` of this ostensibly innocuous Bacardi promotion. I was on my guard for its entirety, as I was seriously anticipating it to reveal itself to be a PIF about the dangers associated with how alcohol distorts your perception...I mean, that IS what's going on in this ad, is it not, however exotically Bacardi might attempt to dress it up? When the bar patrons at the end go out to catch the last bus home...that's where I was expecting things to take a gut-churning turn for the nasty ("it really is the last bus!", or something along the lines). But no, the ad never seems to grasp the darker implications of the narrative it's selling. This is in spite of offering up a splendidly ominous black void all of its own.
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