Coming Attractions

Synopsis:

A negative image of a man's eyes in a car's rearview mirror. The countershot shows a smiling woman, and her wholly unambiguous facial expressions call our attention to the image's left-hand side, where film clips take shape in a flickering split screen. They show models, cups and various types of vehicles, which are then worked over thoroughly in the next 25 minutes: Coming Attractions. The title refers to both the nature of advertising films and early cinema, the 'cinema of attractions.' The initial visual contact juxtaposes the two genres through editing, and together with avant-garde film they represent the basic troika for 11 chapters in which Peter Tscherkassky examines the varying relationships between these three worlds of moving images.