Like trailers for individual films, these “trailers” for film history (made by a former trailer-maker) use a montage structure which both elides and reconfigures the narrative they promote. When that “narrative” is the entire history of Hollywood cinema—indeed world cinema mapped onto Hollywood cinema under the rubric of “the movies”—as summed up within a brief montage of very short clips, the ideology of cinematic representation as a magic act is overdetermined and foregrounded, bringing it in line at once with other advertising rhetoric (Williamson 140-145) and with that of the.
