The Painted Veil

The Painted Veil

The music builds, the images fly by and a story unfolds in the viewers’ mind. “Sometimes the greatest journey is the distance between two people,” the one liner reads as boats float by in cool blue tones and just after the music dramatically comes to an end. The movie trailer for the film, The Painted Veil, uses appeals to logos through enthymemes, ethos through company logos and pathos through music and images to grab the attention of the audience, in this case the viewer, so that every person who watches this trailer feels like they want to watch the movie.
An enthymeme uses deductive reasoning to form a point. The rhetor moves from a generalization to one particular case. With The Painted Veil, the clips from the movie that were used start to create a story that is, however, not explicably stated. First, the viewer is presented with a woman in bed, beckoning someone to sit down on the bed next to her. It is her left hand, the ring signifying marriage clearly present, which is calling the other person. So already, the viewer thinks, “This woman is married and she is asking someone to come either lie or sit down next to her – clearly making sexual advances towards another person.” Second, footsteps are heard going up a flight of stairs and seen stopping at a door. Then flashes up the next image of two undressed people (a man and a woman, the same woman as seen beckoning before) with terrified expressions on their faces. “This is obviously an illicit affair, which her husband finds out. We know nothing about the man, but that doesn’t matter, the female is a more important character because she was seen before [and as the viewer finds out, will be seen later as well], “ the audience contemplates.
From that sequence of events and those two other reasonings, the viewer finally concludes, “She’s married, cheating on her husband and her husband knows. The person whom she was seen with is not her husband, but the footsteps on the stairs and stopping at the door are. Something bad is about to happen, some life altering experience, for the married couple.” This is a prime example of an enthymeme and a style that is used throughout the entire trailer. The rhetor presents clips that require deductive reasoning for the viewer to find out what the storyline is about. This is a very audience interactive method of rhetoric because it makes the audience think things through, put the pieces together, not just sit there and be told what’s going on.
About 20 seconds into the trailer, two film company logos appear. The first, Warner Independent Pictures presents the well-known white Warner “W”, but with a red streak suddenly shooting up the middle line of the letter and dotting it like an “I” contrasted with a black background. By doing this, the “W” provides credibility, or ethos, to those who may be skeptical about an independent film. At the same time, Warner is also presenting this film as an independent one, different than all the rest and perhaps a bit more dramatic than most. The next logo is from the Yari Film Group, words in the forefront, letters in the back; the “Y” being twice the size as the “F” stacked on the “G”. Clearly, the most important point to them was the “Yari” portion of the title. With hues of teal and blue as the background color, the viewer adjusts from the dramatic black, white and red of the last logo to a more serene scene – telling of the film as a dramatic, yet pleasant movie to watch. There is another catch to company logos: if people know them and love them, they may automatically assume it is a good movie without even watching the rest of the trailer. Conversely, when someone has had a bad experience with these companies, in order to dispel harsh feelings, a good trailer is necessary to grasp the viewer’s attention.
The last technique is pathos, an appeal to the viewers’ emotions. This method is heavily used in The Painted Veil trailer, as is usual with most movie trailers, movies and other artistic renditions of life. The first, and most notable use of pathos is the music. Heavy use of Asian drums as one scene transitions from another makes the scenes dramatic and emphatic. Along with drumbeats, the way a scene transitions to another makes all the difference. The more dramatic scenes, especially in the beginning, use a fade to black technique, making those scenes choppy and thus emphasized. To contrast these dramatic scenes and to show a change in the storyline, both the music and the scene transitions are altered. An Asian-type piano is used to make the music higher pitched and faster, yet more elegant while the scenes cross fade into each other. As the storyline progresses even further, violins are added to the drums and the piano to draw upon the viewer’s own heartstrings. Violins, if used properly, almost always instantaneously make the listener feel sympathetic to whatever scene is occurring.
Another use of ethos in this trailer is the images or clips of the movie portrayed. In the beginning, the trailer focuses on passions of a sexual nature and of hatred, or of one who has been spurned, seen with the two main characters who are married yet are not happily married. Then fear, as well as the need to grow and change, appears about mid-way through when they head to a cholera-infested city in China. Happiness and joy with life as sickness is evaded and sadness and misery when it is not. As love is rekindled between the husband and wife near the end, ecstasy occurs. But as soon as that emotion is felt, it is immediately replaced with sorrow when the wife’s eyes are seen crying. Such a wide range of emotions in one trailer! The audience is quickly sucked into the power of this rainbow-effect of emotions that most viewers then think, “If this is how the trailer makes me feel, imagine what the movie will be like!”
The overarching theme associated with this trailer is the contrast of emotions, colors and music that make the film seem like it has two very different sides to it, and thus more appealing to a wider range of viewers. When the drums suddenly stop, the name of the title appears in a pale yellow and thin serif font. The color of the letters matches the scene in the background, which is a calming scene of dark mountains and water with a setting orange-yellow sun. The contrast between black and pale yellow make the letters not only easier to see, but this contrast focuses the title, which is the most important part of the trailer. However, not only are the letters contrasted with the background, that scene is immediately contrasted with the next and last scene, which is the one-liner with the boats and the blue. To end on such a contrasting note harkens the viewer back to the theme of this trailer and ultimately the movie.
When all of these elements, logos, ethos, and pathos, are used well in conjunction to form a movie trailer, a very unique thing is created. Most importantly, the audience ends up doing what the rhetor set out to accomplish: persuade the audience to be moved enough emotionally by this trailer to make them want to go see it in theaters.