Indonesian Movie Trailers: Persuading Movie-Goers Through Incomplete Narratives

Abstract

Movie trailers are a form of advertising that inform prospective audiences of an upcoming movie. They are a form of narrative film exhibition, combining promotional discourse and narrative. Two issues need to be clarified in the case of movie trailers, namely whether they fulfil the requirements as narrative texts and whether they can perform persuasive functions. In order to explore these issues, this chapter offers a perspective from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)-driven methodologies. In the data analysis, the movie trailers are treated as multimodal texts due to the co-deployment of language, image and sound. In order to examine these semiotic modes, the movie trailers are examined using macro transcription principles and narrative genre structure. The results support the argument that movie trailers are a form of narrative, the construction of which is realised by the semiotic modes of language, image and sound. Also, it is revealed that movie trailers’ narratives tend to omit the Resolution stage of the narrative structure, resulting in an incomplete narrative. The absence of this stage, however, enhances the trailers’ appeal as a persuasive tool to attract movie-goers to watch the movie.