These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. 

I have a strong affection for the unique era of movie trailers represented by this promotional assemblage for the drama Marty, which would go on to become one of the rare smaller scale films to claim the Academy Award for Best Picture. As with other trailers from around this time — the mid-nineteen-fifties — it includes a remarkable number of the film’s key scenes, including the closing shot (though it’s highly decontextualized here). What I really stirs my affection is the structure, which counts of Burt Lancaster, a producer of the film, addressing the audience directly in full beaming movie star mode explaining why Marty is such a special picture. He’s chummy and gregarious, his oak tree certainty providing full reassurance that Marty is a film that absolutely must be seen. It’s unimaginable that this sort of approach would be palatable today (imagine how insufferable it would have been had the 12 Years a Slave trailer hinged on producer Brad Pitt giving it his celebrity imprimatur), but I’m a little wistful that it worked once upon a time.