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Word & Image
A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry
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Three words to tell a story: the movie poster
tagline
Johannes Mahlknecht
To cite this article: Johannes Mahlknecht (2015) Three words to tell a story: the movie poster
tagline, Word & Image, 31:4, 414-424, DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2015.1053036
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2015.1053036
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Three words to tell a story: the movie poster tagline
JOHANNES MAHLKNECHT
Of all the possible paratextual elements and sub-elements that
encircle and frame a film — such as title sequences, presentation
of cast and crew, as well as film trailers — the movie
tagline is perhaps the one that leads the most marginalized
existence. This may not surprise us, as taglines consist only of
one or two short sentences commonly found on film posters. As
framing elements of framing elements, they may easily escape
our attention. Their importance as paratextual enliveners of
another paratext (the poster), however, cannot be denied. After
all, there are people who can make a comfortable living out of
writing a few witty words (often no more than three) that
highlight a specific aspect of the film they are hired to
advertise.1
Producers, it seems, deem the tagline an essential
tool of film marketing — one that definitely deserves closer
scrutiny.
This article explores the functions, historical conventions,
and style (in terms of use of rhetorical devices) of the movie
tagline. In both form and function similar to a print advertising
slogan, the tagline has long established itself as a useful tool to
excite the interest of (potential) filmgoers, and has become a
fixed element for the promotion of films. Although versions of
it appear in all periods of cinema history, film analysts have
hitherto given it little attention. There are a number of books2
and articles3
about the film poster, which occasionally mention
and discuss the tagline, but they never do so in any detail.
Their principal focus is invariably on the visual aspect of their
chosen subject, and since taglines, consisting of writing, are
often printed in small letters, they boast hardly any visual
qualities, and can easily be overlooked. Thus, by highlighting
a both marginal and marginalized element of the cinematic
peritext, this article can be seen as an attempt to fill a void. It is
an attempt to give due credit to an advertising tool whose
tradition is almost as long and as varied as that of cinema itself.
The main questions that I seek to address are the following4
:
what major functions does the tagline perform other than that
of trying to catch the viewer’s attention? What is the relationship,
if any, between the tagline (as frame) and the poster image
(as the framed), as well as between the tagline and other
elements found on the poster? What information does the
tagline give us about the film it advertises, and in what way is
this information conveyed? What major rhetorical devices (if
any) does the tagline employ in order to achieve its intended
effect? How do taglines differ, in their forms and functions,
from each other and, finally, how did the tagline change in the
course of history?
For the purpose of analyzing the tagline and being able to
point out general tendencies concerning its use and functions,
I collected around a thousand examples from all periods of
cinema history. The data are taken from illustrated books on
film posters5
as well as from Internet sources, the most
important being the Internet Movie Database (IMDb),
which contains a vast collection. Also of great help were
several lists published on the Internet, which attempt to present
the best taglines ever written.6
By drawing data from
these different sources I have been able to gather a healthy
mix of both classic and ordinary (that is, dull) taglines that
allow for significant and reliable statements on tagline conventions
and on the change of these conventions over time.
The films that the various taglines advertise vary both in
genre and in quality. All genres, from A-list romantic comedy
to horror B-movies (whose posters often feature the most
playful taglines) are included, and taglines for classic films
(from Birth of a Nation to American Beauty) feature as prominently
as those for films which are largely forgotten, such as
Girls on Probation (1938, William C. McGann) or On the Loose
(1951, Charles Lederer).
If not mentioned otherwise, all taglines in this article are
taken from US American posters and one-sheets. Their origin
has been double-checked with the MoviePosterDB, an online
corpus of film posters from countries all over the world.7
But what exactly is a tagline? The Oxford English Dictionary
defines it simply as “a catchphrase, slogan, or punchline.”
Webster’s Dictionary gives two different meanings: “1. the last
line of a play, story, speech, etc., used to clarify or dramatize
a point. 2. a phrase or catchword that becomes identified or
associated with a person, group, product, etc., through repetition.”
According to these definitions, the word “tagline” is not
used solely in combination with movies, but concerns all (print)
advertising, where it usually occurs at the bottom of the page of
an advertisement — as opposed to the headline on top.
According to Webster’s first definition, it may even occur as
part of literary texts.
Both, or rather all three, definitions capture some but not all
of what makes a movie tagline a movie tagline. None links the
tagline explicitly to film (the term is, after all, also used generally
in print advertising8
). Only Leo Online Dictionary does this,
translating the term into German as a “kurze Inhaltsangabe
eines Kinofilms” (“a short film synopsis”) — a rather shaky
definition that only applies sometimes, and then only up to a
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point.9
The back of a DVD cover also usually contains a “short
synopsis,” but that has little to do with the tagline.
In terms of its basic functions, the movie tagline is very similar
to an advertising slogan for any product on the market, like
Nike’s “Just do it,” or McDonald’s “I’m loving it.” In many
ways the tagline is the film’s slogan, and in literature that discusses
the subject is also sometimes referred to as such. Gregory
J. Edwards, in his book The International Film Poster, for instance,
uses the term “slogan” throughout.10
Likewise, Thomas
Elsaesser and Malte Hagener define the tagline as a film’s
“advertising slogan.”11
In the advertising business, the practice
of tagline writing is generally referred to as “writing copy.”12
For the sake of accuracy, a distinction between tagline and
headline — concerning the position on the film posters —
would sometimes make sense, especially when we consider
that some film posters, such as that for The Crying Game (1992),
feature two lines — one at the top (“Lust. Murder. Betrayal. In
Neil Jordan’s new thriller, nothing is what it seems to be”) and
one at the bottom (“… play it at your own risk”). However,
such examples are comparatively rare, and since the position of
the words does not necessarily make for a discernible distinction
in terms of their function and/or style, I will only use the
term “tagline.”
Being an element of advertising, the main function of the
tagline is, of course, that of catching the interest of the potential
audience and of luring them into the cinema — a function it
shares with the element of advertising it is part of, namely the
film poster. The following statement concerning the function of
the latter was made as early as 1914 and still holds true today:
It is evident that the mission of the poster is to attract people.
The poster must bring the people across the street. Secondly,
having gotten them there, you must tell them in as few words
as possible what they will see when they get inside. You must
excite their curiosity sufficiently to make them part with their
nickel, dime, or quarter. Thirdly, you must appeal to their
artistic sense, and managers are apt to underrate this quality
of the general public’s mind.13
“Bringing the people across the street” is, first and foremost,
the job of the poster image — and possibly of the film’s title
and/or stars’ names, provided they are written large enough to
be read from a distance (which more often than not they are).
As Robert Osborne, in his introduction to Dianna Edwards’s
Picture Show: Classic Movie Posters from the TCM Archives, says
about posters from Hollywood’s Golden Age: “The most
important thing a movie poster could do was, in one quick
glance, let a prospective ticket buyer know (a) the title of said
film, (b) who’s in it, and (c) its genre, be it a comedy, a musical,
a western, or film noir drama.”14
And if the poster attempts to
appeal to the artistic sense via more or less elaborate and
extravagant styles of painting or photography, the tagline
does the same by using the rhetorical techniques of poetry or
prose literature (the most important of which are discussed
later in this article).
In her book Coming Attractions, Lisa Kernan, while analyzing
the persuasive functions of trailers, applies Aristotelian rhetoric
to film advertising. The three main rhetorical appeals she
discusses are the rhetoric of genre, story, and stardom,15
appeals
that we can easily transfer to the tagline as well. Tagline writers
choose to focus on the one element of the film they believe has
the most potential to draw audiences. And while a tagline may
relate to two or even all three of the above appeals simultaneously,
one usually dominates. The tagline for a film with an
unknown cast, for instance, will seldom refer to the lead actors.
Instead, it will address genre or story elements. In addition to
genre, story, and stardom (and note that stardom here also
includes directors and producers), I have added two more
aspects of a film to which taglines may refer: the appeal of
quality and that of technical achievements.
Below, along with concrete examples, is a list of these five
appeals (there are more, but these are the ones that clearly
dominate), which steer our expectations in a specific direction:
Story The 39 Steps (1935): “Handcuffed to the girl who
double-crossed him!”
The Fugitive (1993): “A murdered wife. A onearmed
man. An obsessed detective. The chase
begins.”
Genre The Fly (1985): “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
Anchors Aweigh (1945): “On waves of song, laughter
and romance!”
Stardom Ninotchka (1939): “Garbo laughs!”
The Naked Gun 33 1/3 (1994): “From the brother of
the director of Ghost”16
Road House (1989): “The dancing’s over. Now it
gets dirty.”17
Quality Citizen Kane (1941): “Its terrific!”
The Heiress (1949): “A truly great motion picture!”
Technical
achievements
The House of Wax (1953): “The first feature produced
by a major studio in 3D!”
The Wizard of Oz (1939): “Metro-GoldwynMayer’s
Technicolor triumph!”
Of course, several of these aspects can be combined in one
single tagline, as in Torch Song’s (1953) “Tough Baby — a
wonderful love story with the star of Sudden Fear and for the
first time you’ll see her in Technicolor!” The problem of
integrating more aspects into one tagline, however, is that it
may end up being too long. After all, part of the art of the
poster’s text, as mentioned, lies in conveying as much information
as possible in as few words as possible. This may be one
reason why some film posters have two or even more taglines.
That of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), for instance, has one
line on top that refers to genre and quality (“The uproarious
movie from the big best-seller!”) and another in the middle,
which refers to the star of the film, Doris Day: “Hear Doris
sing!” If passersby are not willing to read all of a longer text, so
the philosophy seems to go, they might read two short ones.
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What I have not mentioned in the list above is the fact that
the tagline, just like the poster as a whole, should “appeal to
[our] artistic senses.”18
The above appeals refer to what the
tagline tells us and its artistry concerns how it tells it. I will
discuss the art or, indeed, the poetry, of the tagline. Before,
however, let us have a look at where, how, and how often we
find taglines displayed on film posters.
Not every poster comes with a tagline, but that does not
necessarily mean that the film has not got one. The famous
poster for Vertigo (1958), for instance, which shows the stylized
image of a man falling into a spiral, features no tagline. On a
different poster for the same film, however, we read: “Alfred
Hitchcock engulfs you in a whirlpool of terror and tension.”
The marketing department usually produces several posters for
one film — and often also several taglines. A film may easily
have up to five, or even more, different taglines,19
each presented
on a different poster and in a different manner. One
poster version for Citizen Kane (1941), for instance, presents the
tagline, “It’s terrific!” in relatively small letters on top of title
and image, and on another version it is presented in the
middle, written across the image of Orson Welles, and printed
in letters larger even than the title of the film itself.
It may well be, furthermore, that posters carrying the same
images are released in two different versions — one with and
one without a tagline. Or there may be many different posters
for one film, with many different taglines. Prior to the release of
Beowulf (2007), for instance, several teaser posters — which, just
like teaser trailers, tend to reveal little about the film and
nothing about cast and crew — were released. Each of these
teaser posters sported the picture of one of the protagonists, as
well as a tagline semantically connected to that particular
character. The poster showing Beowulf (Ray Winstone) reads,
“Pride is the curse”; that with the picture of the monster
Grendel (Crispin Glover), “Evil breeds pain”; and the one
featuring Grendel’s mother (Angelina Jolie), “Survival is ruthless.”
The tagline on another poster, again showing Angelina
Jolie, this time looking seductively at the viewer, twists
Beowulf’s character poster into: “Temptation is the curse.” A
further one shows a bare-chested Beowulf, sword drawn and
looking fiercely at Grendel’s mother (of whom we can see only
the shapely legs, complete with high heels and dragon’s tail).
Here the tagline, “I will kill your monster,” is taken directly
from the screenplay, spoken by Beowulf as a promise to rid the
Danish people of Grendel, who keeps terrorizing them. The
tagline “Pride is the curse” also features on the definitive, fullrelease
film poster containing the billing block with all relevant
information about cast and crew. Some of these posters, however
(again, there are more than one), do not feature a tagline
at all. One further tagline on another full-release poster for
Beowulf (with a different image) reads: “Face your demons.”
The example of Beowulf shows that, in theory, any number of
posters and taglines, and any number of poster–tagline combinations,
are possible. We can see Beowulf’s taglines, along with
the various poster images, as separate pieces of a large puzzle;
if we organize the information we can draw from each one in
the correct manner, we have much of the complete story
spread out right before us, even without actually having seen
the film. It would be interesting to analyze how far one is able
to reconstruct a film’s story only by looking at its advertising
materials, but that would go beyond the aims of this article.
What concerns us here is the (potential) multitude of posters
and taglines that exist for a single film. Indeed, professional
movie tagline writer Jason Byers submits around fifty ideas for
each project — and moviegoers “see only the winners.”20
Speaking of the multitude of taglines a film may have, it
should also be mentioned that for re-releases of particular films
new posters and sometimes slightly altered versions of the
original ones are often produced — as well as new, or slightly
altered, taglines. Similarly, DVD covers may carry different
taglines from that of the original poster. The original tagline on
the poster for Grease (1978), for instance, presented next to the
title, reads “… is the word.” On the cover of the twenty-fifth
anniversary DVD edition it is slightly, and aptly, changed into
“… is still the word.”
This brings us to the question of how the use of taglines
evolved and changed over the decades. In his detailed account
of “The Origin and Development of the American Moving
Picture Poster,” Gary D. Rhodes states that “by the year 1915
posters were firmly in place as a key part of marketing moving
pictures.”21
They had, however, already been used sporadically
years before that, and often were not designed individually for
each film but reused for others.22
As Janet Staiger, speaking
about film advertising in general, states: “National advertising
was common practice for many industries at the time movies
were invented. … National advertising of individual films, not
just company brand names, became widespread in the
1930s.”23
The tagline (or slogan, as Edwards refers to it), likewise,
“had been used on posters right from the start.”24
The
poster for the most famous early feature film, The Birth of a
Nation (1915), in fact, already carries a line beneath its image:
“The fiery cross of the Ku-Klux-Klan.” Another one advertises
the film as “D.W. Griffith’s mighty spectacle.” And in principle
the uses of both posters and taglines have not changed until
today.
But although the basic functions of the tagline have
remained the same throughout its history, the way it was, and
is, used has undergone considerable change. Just as with the
design of the poster artwork in general, several trends concerning
the content and style of the tagline prevalent at a certain
period in time can be observed. One significant difference
between Classical Hollywood and later periods, for instance,
is the way of using the tagline for advertising the production
company as well as the film’s stars. While contemporary film
posters feature both company and stars, they are rarely mentioned
in the taglines themselves. Only lines that tell us something
about the director (usually reading “From the director of
[successful movie previously released]”) occur with any regularity.
Posters for films made until the 1960s, however, are teeming
416 JOHANNES MAHLKNECHT
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with taglines pointing out that in this film two stars are
“together for the first time” (It Happened One Night, 1935); that
the film in question features “the first, momentous clash of
Hollywood’s most dynamic stars!” (All This and Heaven Too,
1940); or that, in the film advertised, “Garbo laughs!”
(Ninotchka, 1939).
Even more than referring to the stars, taglines of earlier
Hollywood films feature the name of the respective film company,
as in The Love Parade’s (1929) “Paramount’s greatest talking-singing
picture”; Born to Dance’s (1936) “MGM’s dazzling
successor to ‘Great Ziegfeld’!,” or in Dive Bomber’s (1941)
“Warner Bros. thrilling new saga of the skies!” The most recent
tagline listed on the IMDb that still features Warner Bros.
Studios in its tagline is 1959’s Up Periscope (tagline: “Warner
Bros. ‘Maverick’ man! Bigger than ever now and ready right
now in his big-screen big-excitement Technicolor smash!”).
One reason why taglines promoted both studios and stars
more aggressively in the past than now can be found in the rise
and fall of the studio system, which lasted from the 1920s until
the 1950s. During these years the eight companies that ruled
Hollywood (Fox, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO,
Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) had control not
only over actors and directors working for them under longterm
contracts, but also over distributors and movie theaters.
Since the power of the studio bosses reached into all aspects of
film selling as well as filmmaking, each studio could be identified
with a particular genre or style. Warner Bros., for instance,
was known for its social films, MGM for musicals, and
Universal for horror pictures. MGM promised glamour,
Paramount showed European sensibilities in its filmmaking,
and Warner Bros. was known for its realism.25
Each studio
had its own image to defend and to advertise. And since actors
were contractually bound to a particular studio, selling their
names and trying to increase their popularity was, for studios as
well as actors, an investment that ideally paid off in later
productions.
The much-cited Paramount case of 1948 forced studios to
give up their control over movie theater chains, which gradually
led to the end of their double functions as producers and
distributors, and gave actors and directors more freedom to
choose the studio they wanted to work for. All eight studios
except RKO (which went out of business in 1959) still exist
today, but now they are all part of larger media conglomerates,
and thus their personal touch on individual films released
under their banner has largely been lost. Company names
and logos are still very much present. But since, generally
speaking, contemporary audiences care little about who produced
the film in which they are interested, to use the name as
an advertising tool within the tagline has become all but
obsolete.
Another, and perhaps the most obvious, tagline trend
prevalent at specific periods in the history of cinema is the
practice of advertising new advancements in film technology.
During the transition period between silent and sound
cinema, for instance, most posters for talkies used taglines
that in one way or another highlighted the innovation. One
of the most famous of these was Anna Christie’s (1930) “Garbo
talks!” — Greta Garbo being one of the few silent movie
stars who successfully managed to adapt to the new era of
the sound film.26
Other examples are Tenderloins’ (1928)
“Vitaphone’s newest achievement! The picture that talks!”
and The Jazz Singer’s (1927) “See him — and hear him sing!”
(Al Jolson’s famous line of dialogue in that film, “You ain’t
heard nothing yet!” would also have worked wonderfully as
the tagline but was not used on posters.)
The arrival of Technicolor, first used for a Hollywood feature
film in Becky Sharp (1935), prompted the start of the next
flood of taglines advertising the novelty. Examples are Dancing
Pirate’s (1936) “The first dancing musical in 100% new
Technicolor!” or The Dancing Years’ (1950) “Its gorgeous natural
backgrounds and lavish spectacles filmed in color by
Technicolor enchant the eye!” Sometimes the word
Technicolor even took the place usually allotted to the production
company, as in Blossoms in the Dust’s (1941) “Technicolor’s
greatest love story!” Interestingly, a mention of Technicolor in
the tagline can be found on film posters until well into the
1960s27
— as in Cavalry Command’s (1963) “Filmed in the blazing
realism of Technicolor” — long after the novelty had worn off.
Two more technological advancements that caused a stir
and were consequently used in taglines (both were introduced
almost simultaneously in the 1950s) were Cinemascope, which
allowed films to be presented on a wider screen, and 3D
cinema. The tagline for The Robe (1953), for instance, boasts
of “The first motion picture in Cinemascope — the modern
miracle you see without glasses!” thus effectively mocking its
soon-to-be-doomed rival, whose early representative, The House
of Wax (1953), features the taglines: “The first feature produced
by a major studio in 3D!” and “Its thrills come off the screen
right at you!” The revival, or rather the rebirth of 3D cinema,
considering the improved technology (which, however, still
requires glasses) that is taking place today is likely to fare better
than did the first attempts in the 1950s. Taglines today rarely
include the word “3D” — for instance in Clash of the Titans’
(2010) “The Clash Begins in 3D.” None of the taglines for
Beowulf, which was one of the first new 3D releases, mention
anything about it. But this has certainly less to do with modesty
than with the fact that the films, as of now, are mostly released
in both conventional 2D as well as in 3D versions. And where
the latter version is featured, the added spectacle actually is
referred to, even if not necessarily within the tagline per se —
and the reference is sometimes not very subtle, as the Blu-ray
cover for The Polar Express (2004) proves (there is no 3D advertisement
on the cinema release poster).
In the preface to her book Strategic Advertising, Judith
Corstjens states that “ads now have to shout louder, appeal
more strongly or seduce more subtly than in the past.”28
While
generally speaking this statement may be true, when applied to
taglines it is only partly so. The main difference between almost
417
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all taglines of the Classical Hollywood period and more recent
ones is that those produced from the beginnings to the end of
the studio system definitely shouted louder than those produced
in later years. No matter which aspect of the film in
question they referred to (story, genre, stardom, quality, or
technical achievements) they almost invariably ended with an
exclamation mark. And while in a tagline referring to the
(supposed) quality of a film, like Citizen Kane’s “It’s terrific!”
this makes sense, in others, referring to story or genre, like
Alexander’s Ragtime Band’s (1938) “An American Cavalcade!” or
The More the Merrier’s (1943) “Home is where you hang your
guests!,” the practice seems less comprehensible. It seems that
in early periods shouting out the tagline was often as important
as — or even more important — than its actual content.
Subtlety, especially in the first decades of tagline writing, was
very rare indeed. Edwards states that early taglines occurred
only “in such usually unimaginative and meaningless forms as
‘The Season’s Laugh Treat’ or ‘It’s so Romantic.’”29
Only
Warner Bros.’ posters, he claims:
have been consistently inventive in using a few words to tell
the public exactly what to expect, as in The Great Lie (1941)
with Bette Davis and George Brent: “There are some things a
woman has to lie about … to a man!”; and Errol Flynn’s
character in Rocky Mountain (1950): “Part renegade, part hero
… a rebel whose guns turned treason into glory … for his
captive Yankee girl!”30
But even Warner Bros. released a fair number of unoriginal
run-of-the-mill taglines, like The Jazz Singer’s (1927) “Warner
Bros.’ supreme triumph” or June Bride’s (1948) “Warner Bros.’
new laugh-team in the happiest hit of their lives!!!” True
attempts at wit during the classical Hollywood era, like the
double entendre in The Maltese Falcon’s (1941) “He’s a killer when he
hates,” did occur but, as already mentioned, only rarely.
More or less subtle experiments can be observed not only
in the taglines themselves, but also in their visual presentation
on the poster, and particularly in their relationship with the
poster’s image. Just like film itself, a film poster draws our
attention initially because of its visual properties and not
because of its written ones. There are a number of posters
where the writing dominates over visuals but they are clearly
in the minority. One example is the poster for All the King’s
Men (1949), on which the title and tagline (“The Pulitzer Prize
winning novel becomes a vital, very great motion picture”)
together occupy twice as much space as the poster image.
Speaking about print ads in general, James Leigh states that
“the headline has long been considered to be the most
important part of a print advertising.”31
Concerning the tagline,
this is certainly not the case, at least not when it comes
to the recipients. They are more likely to be more interested if
not in the poster image, then in the stars’ names. For the
advertising company, however, tagline writing is crucial. As
Jon Mooallem states: “writing ad copy for posters and trailers
is generally the first step in marketing a film, setting a
strategic direction for what are often multimillion dollar
campaigns.”32
The relevant question, however, is not which element dominates
over the other, but whether or not tagline and poster
image complement each other, and if so, how much. In print
advertising it is a generally held opinion that to establish a link
between headline and image has a positive effect on potential
(ticket) buyers, since they “convey … a unified concept.”33
A
unified concept, after all, is easier to remember than a combination
of non-interactive elements. The relationship between
text and image may range from a verbal repetition of picture
content to a less marked relation of one element to the other.
In many cases both the image and the tagline speak largely
for themselves. While one element often emphasizes or reinforces
one or more aspects of the other, the tagline or the
poster image respectively, it is not dependent on it, at least
not in terms of our ability to understand its meaning. To
take an example of a mutual reinforcement of tagline and
image, let us consider the poster for The Mutilator (1985), with
the tagline: “By sword. By pick. By axe. Bye bye.” Even
without seeing the image we are likely to guess that the
film in question not only belongs to the horror or slasher
genre, but also, given the crude (or brilliant, depending on
one’s frame of mind) pun involved, that it will be one of its
cheaper and quite possibly gorier representatives. Likewise,
we can draw the same information from the (again rather
crude) painting of four young adults hanging from a wall,
apparently dead or scared to death. In the foreground we see
the threatening image of a hand holding what looks like a
very large fishhook. The tagline thus, in a way, repeats the
basic message contained in the poster image and elaborates
on it a little — after all, the image does not show us that the
mutilator uses other weapons and which ones in order to kill
(or at least, mutilate) people.
There are, however, quite a number of examples in which
the relationship between tagline and poster image is more
important, in which the one element is used not to repeat but
to explain the other. The tagline for Gilda (1946), for instance,
even refers directly to the image. Positioned next to the image,
which shows a woman (presumably the titular Gilda) being
slapped by a man, it reads, “I was true to one man once …
and look what happened!” Here the relationship between word
and image approaches that established by the common use of
speech bubbles in comic books.
Alternatively, the poster may contain several images,
beneath each of which we find one relevant part of the tagline.
In The Dirty Dozen (1968), “Train them!” is written above an
image of a soldier being drilled by a drill sergeant; “Excite
them!” above that of a soldier holding and kissing beautiful
women; “Arm them!” above an image of paratroopers in
action. Finally, “… then turn them loose on the Nazis!” is
written above the larger central image portraying Lee Marvin
at the head of the “Dirty Dozen,” toting guns in the midst of a
depiction of war mayhem.
418 JOHANNES MAHLKNECHT
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Historically speaking, we may say that direct links
between tagline and image are phenomena encountered
mostly on posters for films made before the 1980s and
especially within the period of Classical Hollywood cinema.
If there is a pronounced link between poster image and
tagline in examples of more recent years, this link tends to
be of a different, and usually subtler,34
nature. The tagline
for Fargo (1996), for instance, reads “A homespun murder
story.” Taking the meaning of the word “homespun” literally,
the whole poster, including the tagline itself, consists
of a cross-stitch showing the bloody corpse of a man lying
face down in the snow.
The relationship between tagline and title
Just as the tagline may explain or elaborate on the poster
image, it may also be connected to the title of the film it
advertises. One possibility is making the title part of the tagline,
either at its beginning, like Grease’s “… is the word,” or at
the end, like The Ring’s (2002) “Before you die, you see…” It is
interesting to note here that the first example refers to none of
the five appeals discussed earlier (story, genre, stardom, quality,
technical achievements).35
The second, although bewildering,
at least points to genre, so that we can guess that we are
dealing with a horror movie. Whether the tagline can be
considered, however, an example of effective advertising (do
we want to see the film if we will die afterwards?) is another
question.
The tagline that incorporates the title is typical for classic
Hollywood films. Usually, the line is written in small letters
above the large-lettered title, and three full stops establish
the link. Generally such taglines are rather uninspired as, for
example, “You hear what you see while enjoying…” (In Old
Arizona, 1929). More stylistically elaborate ones, such as
“Thrill crazy… Kill crazy…” (Gun Crazy, 1950), are much
rarer.
Another possible connection between tagline and title is the
question/answer relationship; the tagline asks the question, the
title answers it — e.g. Ghostbusters’ (1984) “Who ya gonna call?”
(on the DVD cover of the twenty-fifth anniversary edition). The
tagline may also consist of several questions, as the poster for
Barbarella (1968) shows: “Who gives up the pill? Who takes sex
to outer space? Who’s the girl of the 21st century? Who nearly
dies of pleasure? Who seduces an angel? Who strips in space?
Who conveys love by hand?”
The tagline can also explain the title or elaborate upon it.
The Sheepman’s (1958) tagline, for instance, tells us that “They
called him the stranger with the gun” and Robocop (1987) is
“Part man. Part machine. All cop” and, according to a second
tagline, “The future of law enforcement.”
Since the first and foremost function of the tagline (and of
movie advertising in general) is that of making the potential
audience want to see the film, it seems only natural to expect
that most taglines will boast of the respective film’s quality. And
there are indeed a great number of posters from the silent
period up to the Golden Age of Hollywood that do exactly
that, often using superlative after superlative. The Ghost of
Slumber Mountain (1918), for instance, is advertised as “The
crowning triumph of the motion picture” (a rather grandiose
claim for a film that lasts only eighteen minutes); The Jazz Singer
(1927), similarly, as “Warner Bros.’ supreme triumph”; and the
tagline on the poster for Citizen Kane (1941) all but shouts, “It’s
terrific!” — in letters larger even than those of the film’s title.
The tagline for Woman (1918) — “The season’s most unusual
screen offering” — seems almost humble in comparison.
While the above examples tell us nothing about the actual
content, theme, or genre of the film in question, there are
many that combine praise with concrete information. Hell’s
Angels (1930) is sold as “Howard Hughes’ thrilling multi-million
dollar air spectacle”; Cleopatra (1934) as “A love affair that shook
the world set in a spectacle of thrilling magnificence!”; and Blue
Skies (1946) is “Paramount’s Melody Masterpiece Featuring All
of Irving Berlin’s Biggest Hits!”
The tendency on the part of production companies to glorify
their own films excessively was, in fact, spoofed by Hollywood
itself as early as 1947, in the (meta-)trailer for Miracle on 34th
Street.
The trailer begins with the claim “You’ll love Miracle on 34th
Street,” followed by the presentation of a number of standard
ejaculations: “It’s hilarious! Romantic! Delightful! Charming!
Tender! Exciting!” We then suddenly hear an annoyed voice
interrupting, and cut to a screening room, in which we see a
studio boss criticizing the anxious trailermakers for their lack of
focus, telling them to “make up your minds, it can’t be all of
those things!” Only after he himself has seen the film does he
change his mind and even adds “Groovy!” to the others.
To a contemporary (potential) audience such overflowing
glorification of a film on the poster will seem either hopelessly
dated, or even ridiculous (after all, which company does not
want us to believe that its own product is the greatest of them
all?). A line such as that on the British poster for Quentin
Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) — “An amazing, awesome,
pumping powerhouse of a movie” — is only acceptable
because it is a quotation by a critic who officially reviewed
the film,36
and who is credited on the poster.37
Today such
critics’ praise can be found very frequently on movie posters
and DVD/Blu-ray covers. But while serving the same basic
purpose as the tagline, i.e. luring audiences into the cinema (or
urging them to buy the DVD or Blu-ray respectively), such
praise cannot, however, be defined as such, for the simple
reason that it was not originally written by the film’s marketing
department.38
For Reservoir Dogs, then, the real tagline remains
“Let’s go to work.”
The gradual move from studio-written praise to quotations
by film reviewers, according to the posters I scanned, started in
the 1950s, the first example I discovered being Marty (1955).
Other early film posters containing review excerpts are those
for Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which is littered with
them, and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). The reason for this
change is easily explained: if every second film claims to be
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“The greatest film in the history of cinema,” the statement will
quickly lose its credibility. That posters largely feature reviews
more than simple studio praise is a sign that film audiences
gradually became more demanding, and bolsters Corstjens’
claim that “ads now have to … seduce more subtly than in
the past.”39
One should note, however, that even if the praise comes with
quotation marks and an indication of source, its authenticity is
not necessarily guaranteed. A British poster advertisement for
the comedy Me, Myself & Irene (2000 — tagline: “From gentle to
mental”) contained a “quotation” from Total Film Magazine,
reading: “If you don’t laugh out loud you need your head
examined.” In the review that was actually published the sentence
was a little longer, reading, “If you don’t laugh out loud at least
once you need your head examined”40
— a substantial difference.
If in their marketing campaigns production companies
continuously try to outdo each other at having their products
praised, it is hardly surprising that there are some who
(possibly out of protest) turn in the completely opposite
direction. In a seemingly perverse act (at least in terms of
conventional marketing strategies), the poster for Lost
Highway (1997, David Lynch) featured the damning verdict
of film critics Siskel and Ebert: “Two Thumbs Down.”
Similarly, even if perhaps a little more cleverly, a British
advertisement for The Hottie and the Nottie (2008) carried
above its title in large print the words “The number one
film,” and directly underneath (in much, much smaller letters):
“imdb (bottom 100).” It goes without saying that such
examples are exceptions, and that neither of the two films
had substantial success at the box office.
But what about the rhetorical properties of taglines? What
“literary” techniques do they use in order efficiently to draw
our attention? As early as 1910, the French art critic and art
historian Roger Marx discovered that commercialism and art
do not have to be, and in fact are not, mutually exclusive.
The fact is, that to be sure to make an impression and better
to convince, Advertising has called upon Art for help; it has
borrowed the poetry of allegories, it has become image and
its beautiful appearance has bestowed upon it, with unexpected
efficiency, the indefeasible right to the aesthete’s
attention.41
In terms of film advertising, this statement clearly relates
more to the visual aspect of the early poster than to the tagline,
which at that time was still in need of development. The
poetry, or “literariness,”42
of the taglines that did develop in
the course of the decades to follow can best be appreciated
when looking at some of the many rhetorical figures that they
may employ.
Rhetorical figures are defined as “a generic term for any
artful deviations from the ordinary mode of speaking or
writing.”43
In advertising, their use is intended to increase the
effect of persuading potential customers to buy a specific
product:
Rhetoricians maintain that any proposition can be expressed
in a variety of ways and that in any given situation one of
these ways will be the most effective in swaying an audience.
Hence, when persuasion is the overriding goal, the rhetorical
perspective suggests that the manner in which a statement is
expressed may be more than its propositional content.44
While the tagline, as I have already mentioned at the beginning
of this article, has been hitherto largely neglected by scholars,
there is significant work on the rhetoric of the print advertising
slogan in general that has been conducted in the most recent
decades, notably by Leigh,45
McQuarrie and Mick,46
and
Cook.47
Drawing on their findings, the following paragraphs
attempt to show that the tagline can be seen as a (persuasive)
literary genre all its own — although admittedly it requires
some good will in order to define Volcano’s (1997) “The coast is
toast” or Armageddon’s (1998) “Time to kick some asteroid” as
literature or poetry. But then, as Corbett states, persuasive
activities “can be said to fall within the province of rhetoric”
even if they only “approach the condition of art.”48
In analyzing a particularly widespread form of tagline, the
list, the following paragraphs will show how “artful deviation”
is used in order to lure audiences.
List and twist
In terms of their syntactic organization, one of the most
frequent kinds of taglines is the list, often consisting of no
more than three words. These lists can be found on early film
posters, like that of The General (1927) — “Love, locomotives,
and laughs!” and they have not lost their popularity up to the
present day, a recent example being Match Point’s (2005)
“Passion. Temptation. Obsession.” On the contrary, their
frequency of use has, in fact, increased steadily over the
decades. Very often, especially on posters from the Classical
Hollywood era, alliteration is used in order to make the
tagline sound catchier and more melodic, as in The General
above or in The Outlaw’s (1943) “Mean… Moody…
Magnificent!” If each element of the list consists of more
than one word, then repetition of syntactic structures can
also be used in order to achieve the same effect. Examples
are The Dirty Dozen’s aforementioned “Train them! Excite
them! Arm them! … then turn them loose on the Nazis!” or
The Lusty Men’s (1952) “A fast buck… a fast bronc… a fast
thrill!” The use of alliteration and parallelisms in lists can
also, of course, be combined, and, as the tagline for Seven
Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) proves, the list is not necessarily
reduced to three elements: “Caleb kidnapped Ruth. Ben
borrowed Dorcas. Eph encircled Martha. Gideon grabbed
Alice. Dan decoyed Liza. Frank fetched Sarah … and
Adam abducted Milly.” Here the same sentence-pattern is
used seven times. The parallelism thereby exists not only on
a formal, syntactic, but also on a semantic level. In order to
examine the semantic qualities of the tagline as list, let us look
for a moment at Algirdas Greimas’s concept of isotopy, a
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term he borrowed from nuclear physics and applied to the
study of semiotics. Greimas defines isotopy as “the principle
that allows the semantic concatenation of utterances.”49
As
summed up in Winfried Nöth’s Handbook of Semiotics:
Greimas develops the theory of textual coherence on the basis
of his concept of contextual semes: the “iterativity” (recurrence)
of contextual semes, which connect the semantic elements
of discourse (semems), assures its textual homogeneity
and coherence…. In its syntagmatic extension, an isotopy is
constituted by all those textual segments which are connected
by one contextual seme.50
Each utterance in the tagline for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
consists of three elements, and in each utterance, the first, second,
and third element is semantically linked, analogously, to the first,
second, and third element of each of the other utterances (let us
not consider the “and” in the last one). The first element is always
a male name; the second is a verb whose various manifestations
can be subsumed under the contextual seme “to take”; and the
third consists of a female name. Since we can easily, or even
automatically, establish a semantic link between the various elements,
we see the tagline as a coherent text. If we look at the
poster for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, on which each of the seven
sentences is written next to an image of a man holding a woman
on his shoulders and walking away with her, the coherence is
established even more easily. The interplay between the various
elements (title, tagline, image) on this particular poster is a prime
example of (even if unsubtle) conceptual unity.
But even if the coherence is there, the originality of the
tagline primarily lies in its formal aspects (alliteration, parallelism)
rather than in its actual meaning. It will be remembered
(if at all) more for its form than for its content. And while these
formal aspects of the tagline-as-list were extremely popular
during the Classical Hollywood period, in more recent times
the trend has moved to a more content-based approach in
order to make it more effective. A tagline like Match Point’s
“Passion. Temptation. Obsession.” can be seen as an exceedingly
minimalist “concatenation of utterances” with “textual
homogeneity and coherence”; so minimalist, in fact, that it
only just about qualifies as a text. While each of the words
individually may be seen in a context other than a sexual one,
taken together (and especially seen in connection with the
images of the stars Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan RhysMeyers),
“sexuality” will be the most likely category under
which to file the three elements of the tagline in order to
make for semantic unity.
But what about the tagline for Fight Club (1999) — “Mischief.
Mayhem. Soap.” — which syntactically is structured in the
exact same way as that of Match Point? While the first two
elements can be linked and categorized under the concept of
“chaos” or perhaps “lawlessness” (and can also be linked on a
formal level, both having the same initial letter as well as the
same number of syllables), the third does not seem to fit at all.
What has taken place here is a deliberate isotopic breach. We
are led to expect an element (say, “Madness”) that fits with the
others into a same contextual seme but our expectations are
Table 1. Frequent schemes used in movie taglines.
Kind of scheme Description Tagline Film
Rhyme Repetition of syllables at the end of words How would you like to tussle with Russell? The Outlaw (1943)
The bride gets the thrills! Father gets the bills! Father of the Bride (1950)
Remember, remember the 5th of November. V for Vendetta (2005)
Chime Key words in a phrase begin with identical sounds
or letters
A horror horde of crawl-and-crush giants clawing out of
the earth from mile-deep catacombs!
Them (1954)
Beware the stare that will paralyze the will of the world Village of the Damned (1960)
Assonance and
alliteration
Three or more repetitions of a vowel or consonant The Man… The Music… The Madness… The
Murder… The Motion Picture… [added emphasis]
Amadeus (1984)
Anaphora Repetition of words at the beginning of phrases Come to Laugh, Come to Cry, Come to Care, Come to
Terms.
Terms of Endearment (1983)
Epistrophe Repetition of words at the end of phrases Be afraid. Be very afraid. The Fly (1984)
Epanalepsis Repetition of a word toward the beginning and
end of a phrase
A She-Bang To End All She-Bangs! Cat Ballou (1965)
Boys will be boys. Space Cowboys (2000)
Enough is enough. Enough (2002)
Anadiplosis Repetition of a word toward the end of one
phrase and the beginning of the next
A general who became a slave. A slave who became a
gladiator. A gladiator who defied an emperor.
Gladiator (2000)
Parison Marked parallelism between successive phrases Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free. The Shawshank Redemption
(1994)
Her life was in their hands. Now her toe is in the mail. The Big Lebowski (1998)
Antimetabole Repetition of a pair of words in a phrase in
reverse order
The year of the movie. The movie of the year. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
Antithesis Incorporation of binary opposites in a phrase High school girl by day… and a woman by night… On the Loose (1951)
Life is in their hands — death is on their minds! 12 Angry Men (1957)
After a night they can’t remember comes a day they’ll
never forget.
Dude, Where’s My Car?
(2000)
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not met. Only if we think a step further and apply the contextual
seme “anarchy” (which is a major theme of the film)
can we see the third element as motivated. In the film, the
protagonists are anarchists intent on destroying the established
political system and structure; on the poster, the word “soap” is
the anarchist that destroys a potentially well-structured and
intelligible sequence of utterances. This deliberate isotopic
breach results in a bewildering twist, one intended to rouse
our curiosity further and make us want to see what the whole
thing actually is about. And once we have seen the film and
know the larger context, we are able to understand that “Soap”
actually fits very well with “Mischief” and “Mayhem”; for we
learn that soap can be used as a main component for explosives.
Only if we know this do we realize that the isotopic
breach is actually no breach at all.
The “list with a twist” is one that we encounter very
frequently in contemporary taglines. Other than in Fight
Club’s example, however, the isotopic breach is much more
often used for creating humor than for confusing potential
audiences.51
The isotopic breach is, after all, what often constitutes
the punchline for jokes. Johnny English’s (2003) tagline,
for instance, reads: “He knows no fear. He knows no danger.
He knows nothing.” All three utterances are analogous, and
seemingly coherent, in that they refer to different things the
protagonist does not know. The breach, however, lies in the
fact that, while the first two elements point out his heroic (and
thus positive) qualities, the third refers to his stupidity, hardly
a positive characteristic. The parallelism of the syntax, which
we would expect to be analogous with a semantic parallelism,
is coupled with a complete opposite. The mixture of the
rhetorical figures of parallelism and antithesis (i.e. “the juxtaposition
of contrasting ideas”)52
results in humor. Other examples,
in which the same principle is at work, are the taglines
for Lake Placid (1999, a film about a man-eating alligator):
“Part mystery. Part thriller. Part missing,” Army of Darkness
(1992, about a man who, along with his car, is sent back
into the Middle Ages to fight zombies): “Trapped in time.
Surrounded by evil. Low on gas,” and Ed Wood (1994, a biopic
about the allegedly worst film director of all time): “Movies
were his passion. Women were his inspiration. Angora sweaters
were his weakness.” These are only a few of many more
examples; in fact, there are so many that a twistless tagline-aslist
today, such as Match Point’s “Passion. Temptation.
Obsession,” is almost original again.
There are, of course, many more rhetorical figures other
than alliteration, parallelisms, and antithesis that are used in
film taglines. To discuss each one independently and in detail
would, however, reach beyond the scope of this article. For
Table 2. Frequent tropes used in movie taglines.
Kind of trope Description Tagline Film
Hyperbole Exaggerated or extreme claim The most magnificent picture ever! Jezebel (1938)
MGM’s love story with 1,000 laughs! The Reformer and the Redhead
(1950)
Rhetorical
question
Asking a question so as to make an assertion She has a nice job. And a nice baby. What more
could a single girl want?
A Touch of Love (1969)
What did you learn after school today? 3:15 (2009)
Epanorthosis Making an assertion so as to call it into question This man will bring order to the universe … or not. Chaos Theory (2007)
Ellipsis A gap or omission that has to be completed When all else fails, they don’t. G.I. Joe (2009)
Metonym Use of a portion, or any associated element, to
represent the whole
The Fastest Gun To Kingdom Come! From
Tombstone to Abilene even the best of them
feared Cole Younger! [added emphasis]
Cole Younger, Gunfighter (1958)
Metaphor Substitution based on underlying resemblance Their Love was a Flame that Destroyed! The Postman Always Rings
Twice (1946)
Crime is a disease. Meet the cure. Cobra (1986)
Oxymoron Yoking of two terms that are ordinarily contradictory The true story of a real fake. Catch Me if You Can (2002)
Puns:
Antanaclasis Repetition of a word in two different senses He’s quite engaging. She’s otherwise engaged. Four Weddings and a Funeral
(1994)
Paronomasia Use of words alike in sound but different in meaning Exorcise your rites. The Craft (1996)
Syllepsis Use of a word understood differently in relation to two
or more other words, which it modifies or governs
Sea evil. Ghost Ship (1998)
Don’t get mad. Get everything. The First Wives Club (1996)
Paradox An apparently self-contradictory, false, or impossible
statement
Bernie may be dead, but he’s still the life of the
party!
Weekend at Bernie’s (1989)
An epic of miniature proportions. A Bug’s Life (1998)
Simile Explicit comparison between two things of unlike
nature
Falling in love with Redhead is like falling around
with a buzz saw … you’re sure to get hurt!
Redhead (1941)
Hate is like a loaded gun! Crossfire (1947)
Irony A statement that means the opposite of what is said Check in. Unpack. Relax. Take a shower. Psycho (1998)
A nice place to visit. Abduction (2009)
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some more examples, see tables 1 and 2, which show the most
frequent schemes and tropes used in taglines.53
This article has analyzed the movie tagline both in its contextual
relationship with other framing elements as well in the ways in
which it works as an independent genre of its own. Focusing
mainly on the use of rhetorical figures it has tried, where possible,
to draw comparisons between the use of taglines in earlier
periods and the present. The results show that the tagline,
semantically, stylistically, and historically speaking, is a highly
varied tool, perhaps more varied than its apparently subordinate
role on the poster might lead us to expect.
This variety and complexity of the tagline, especially in
terms of its interrelationship with other (para-)texts, is, however,
problematic. Like all paratexts, the tagline is essentially
a minor text — subordinate to a main one (the poster as a
whole and, more importantly, the film it advertises). To see
it as an independent genre therefore automatically means to
limit the range of its importance. While this article has
pointed out some of the interrelationships between the tagline
and other elements of film and film advertising, they are
only the tip of the iceberg. Since the tagline is considered to
be “the first step in marketing a film,”54
just as pitching a
screenplay is the first step in making a film,55
its reverberations
are felt in every other aspect of film advertising (particularly
in trailers, which often contain very similar, if not the
same, lines). Further research might therefore explore more
fully the ways in which the tagline affects other paratextual
elements. As both Syriana’s (2005) and Cloud Atlas’s (2012)
taglines claim: “Everything is connected.”
NOTES
1 – For more insight into the job of a movie tagline writer, see Jessica
Liebmann, “Big Screen, a Few Small Words,” Bizjournals, http://upstart.
bizjournals.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2007/07/31/Movie-TaglineWriters.html?page=all
(July 31, 2007, accessed November 26, 2014).
2 – For example Emily King, A Century of Movie Posters: From Silent to Art
House (Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s, 2003), and Gregory J. Edwards, The
International Film Poster (Salem, NH: Salem House, 1985).
3 – For example Gary D. Rhodes, “The Origin and Development of the
American Moving Picture Poster,” Film History: An International Journal 19,
no. 3 (2007): 228–46.
4 – They are largely in line with Werner Wolf, “Introduction: Frames,
Framings and Framing Borders,” in Framing Borders in Literature and Other
Media, ed. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart (Amsterdam/New York:
Rodopi, 2006), 1–40.
5 – Specifically, Bruce Hershenson, Best Pictures’ Movie Posters (West Plains,
MO: Bruce Hershenson, 1999); Edwards, International Film Poster; and Tony
Nourmand and Graham Marsh, eds., Film Posters of the 30s: The Essential
Movies of the Decade (London: Evergreen, 2003).
6 – Most notably Tim Dirks, “Great Film Taglines,“ AMC Filmsite, http://
www.filmsite.org/taglines.html (accessed November 26, 2011).
7 – For the MoviePosterDB, see http://www.movieposterdb.com/.
8 – For example, Edward F. McQuarrie and David Glen Mick, “Figures of
Rhetoric in Advertising Language,” Journal of Consumer Research 22, no. 4
(1996): 424–38.
9 – “Tagline.” Leo, July 28, 2015, https://dict.leo.org/ende/index_de.html” \l
“/search=tagline&searchLoc=0&resultOrder=basic&multiword
ShowSingle=on” \t “_blank” https://dict.leo.org/ende/index_de.html#/
search=tagline&searchLoc=0&resultOrder=basic&multiwordShowSingle=
on/.
10 – Edwards, International Film Poster.
11 – Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Filmtheorie — zur Einführung
(Dresden: Junius, 2007), 40.
12 – See, for instance, Jon Mooallem, “How Movie Taglines are Born,”
Boston Globe, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/
02/29/how_movie_taglines_are_born/?page=full (February 29, 2004,
accessed November 26, 2014). In this essay Mooallem states: “Writing
ad copy for posters and trailers is generally the first step in marketing
a film, setting a strategic direction for what are often multimillion
dollar campaigns. This April, the Key Art Awards, a pseudo-Oscars
for film marketing sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter, will award its
first ‘Best Print Copy Line’ prize after 32 years of honoring virtually
everything else — from best trailer to best ‘theatrical standee,’ as those
cardboard cut-outs standing by the popcorn counter are known.”
13 – Scotson Clark, quoted in Rhodes, “The Origin and
Development,” 228.
14 – Robert Osborne, in Dianna Edwards, Picture Show: Classic Movie Posters
from the TCM Archives (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003), 9.
15 – Lisa Kernan, Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2004), 14.
16 – Here, the absurdity of the tagline (the fact that the director of The
Naked Gun 33 1/3 and that of Ghost are relatives has no real informative
value) also points towards the film’s genre, i.e. slapstick comedy.
17 – The tagline indirectly refers to the star (Patrick Swayze) by (again
indirectly) referring to his previous film.
18 – Scotson Clark, quoted in Rhodes, “The Origin and Development,”
228.
19 – For the horror film Silent Hill (2006), for instance, the IMDb lists as
many as eleven: “Enjoy your stay”; “The game is on”; “Welcome to Silent
Hill”; “The Silence Will Be Broken”; “Not so silent anymore”; “Once you
enter Silent Hill there is no turning back”; “Welcome to Hell”; “Welcome
to paradise…”; “Some towns should never be entered”; “Population:
ZERO”; and “We’ve been expecting you.”
20 – Liebmann, “Big Screen.”
21 – Rhodes, “The Origin and Development,” 242.
22 – Around 1910, the A.B. See Lithograph Company of Cleveland, for
instance, “printed posters with stock borders in two or three colors incorporating
the company’s trademark. Onto the central area of these posters
were printed the title of the film, a plot synopsis and a photograph supplied
by the producer. The photos were usually taken by the film cameraman
during production” (Edwards, International Film Poster, 56).
23 – Janet Staiger, “Announcing Wares, Winning Patrons, Voicing Ideals:
Thinking about the History and Theory of Film Advertising,” Cinema
Journal 29, no. 3 (1990): 3–31, at 14.
24 – Edwards, International Film Poster, 71.
25 – James Monaco, Film Verstehen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2001),
246–47. For more detailed information on the studio system and its politics,
see Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History (London: British
Film Institute, 2005).
26 – Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in Visual
Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, ed. Angela dalle Vacche (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 69–84, at 79.
27 – It even reached into the 1970s. The IMDb lists a tagline for And Now the
Screaming Starts (1973), reading: “A Technicolor film set in a ghostly gothic
manor house, England 1785.”
28 – Judith Corstjens, Strategic Advertising: A Practitioner’s Handbook (Oxford:
Heinemann, 1990), vii.
29 – Edwards, International Film Poster, 71.
30 – Ibid., 71–72.
423
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31 – James H. Leigh, “The Use of Figures of Speech in Print Ad
Headlines,” Journal of Advertising 23, no. 2 (1994): 17–33, at 17.
32 – Mooallem, “How Movie Taglines are Born.”
33 – Leigh, “The Use of Figures of Speech.” Hartmut Stöckl also observes
that the combination of text and image can result in a stylistic element of its
own which, if well employed, may considerably enhance consumers’ disposition
to buy (see Hartmut Stöckl, Werbung in Wort und Bild. Textstil und
Semiotik Englischsprachiger Anzeigenwerbung (Frankfurt am Main 1997: Peter
Lang), 111).
34 – A notable exception is the combination of tagline and image on the
poster for The Hottie and the Nottie (2008), which we may safely describe as
the pillar of unsubtlety. The poster shows the beautiful Paris Hilton in a
bikini next to an “uglified” Christine Lakin. The first half of the tagline is
written to the left of Hilton’s smiling face, the second half to the right of
Lakin’s pimply and gap-toothed mug. Complete, it reads, “That’s hot.
That’s not.”
35 – A similarly information-empty, but nevertheless witty, title-related
tagline is Saturday Night Fever’s (1977) “Catch it.”
36 – In this case Neil Norman, writing for The Evening Standard.
37 – The tagline on the poster for another Tarantino film, Inglorious
Basterds (2009), which reads “An inglorious, uproarious thrill-ride of
vengeance,” is not a quote from a review. It is deliberately old-fashioned,
and works mostly stylistically, because of the similarity between the
words “inglorious” and “uproarious.”
38 – Exceptions are proverbs or quotes, like Schindler’s List’s (1993) “Whoever
saves one life, saves the world entire” (from the Talmud) or V for Vendetta’s
(2005) “Remember, remember the 5th of November,” which were also not
originally written by the marketing department but still qualify as a tagline.
They have been deliberately chosen and taken from one specific context to
be put into another (namely that of the film they advertise).
39 – Corstjens, Strategic Advertising, vii.
40 – “Me, Myself & Irene,” Total Film, http://www.gamesradar.com/memyself-and-irene-review/
(September 22, 2000, accessed November 26,
2014) (emphasis added).
41 – Quoted in Edwards, International Film Poster, 10.
42 – To use a term introduced by Russian Formalism. Literariness is “that
which makes a given text a work of literature. Literariness, for the
Formalists, inheres in the form of a text, its characteristic ways of deploying
style and convention, and especially in its capacity to mediate on the
qualities of its form” (Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy
Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (New York 1992: Sight
Lines), 10).
43 – Edward P. J. Corbett and Robert Connors, Classical Rhetoric for the
Modern Student (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 379.
44 – Edward F. McQuarrie and David Glen Mick, “Figures of Rhetoric in
Advertising Language,” Journal of Consumer Research 22, no. 4 (1996): 424–38,
at 424.
45 – Leigh, “The Use of Figures of Speech.”
46 – McQuarrie and Mick, “Figures of Rhetoric.”
47 – Guy Cook, The Discourse of Advertising (New York: Routledge, 2007).
48 – Corbett and Connors, Classical Rhetoric, 396 (emphasis added).
49 – Algirdas Julien Greimas, “Dialogue with Hermann Parret,” in
Discussing Language, ed. Hermann Parret (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 55–
79, at 60.
50 – Winfried Nöth, The Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 319.
51 – In fact, the whole marketing campaign for Fight Club was designed to
puzzle, or even to unsettle, audiences. One teaser trailer, for instance, had
Brad Pitt look into the camera and tell us: “Did you know that urine is
sterile? You can drink it.” Although highly original, financially speaking the
campaign was a failure; Jon Gertner, “Box Office in a Box,” New York Times
Sunday Magazine, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/movies/14DVD.
html?_r=0 (November 14, 2004, accessed November 26, 2014).
52 – Corbett and Connors, Classical Rhetoric, 382.
53 – Schemes are rhetorical figures that alternate sentence or word
structure, and tropes are figures that use words to deviate in meaning
from how they are commonly understood. For a similar chart with
advertising slogans see McQuarrie and Mick, “Figures of Rhetoric,”
430–31.
54 – Mooallem, “How Movie Taglines are Born.”
55 – And very often the tagline is nothing but a condensed version of the
(already condensed) pitch, as in American Gigolo (1980): “He’s the highest
paid lover in Beverly Hills. He leaves women feeling more alive than
they’ve ever felt before. Except one.”
424 JOHANNES MAHLKNECHT
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