The film trailer is represented as a message for the future (the upcoming film). However, it takes the narrative of the past, that is, a video that had already been made. The trailer is not the synopsis or summary of the original film.

“As far as I know, there is no trailer that explains what the film ‘Rosebud’ means.” But trailers are related both to the brief description of films and the creation of mystique. How can we find out whether it is an action or a romantic film? Although we take a trailer as an accidental or very trivial form of its original resource, we have seen a lot more trailers as movie advertisements than the films themselves. We also need to be reminded that this fact influences our ways of creating our cultural knowledge.
Perhaps, we can imagine a trailer as something that does not indicate any other thing but ourselves. This is what Charles de Meaux’s three recent works are about.

They are trailers for non-existent films. In “You Are the Next Astronaut”, Charles de Meaux’s work from 2004, we see pastures in Africa through a green-tinted night lens, a device able to transform the tropical prairie into an alien planet. The starlight-like white glare from the eyes of creatures, be they lions, hyenas, or aliens from outer space, speed across the screen.
Subsequently, we see the landing scene of the Russian artificial satellite Soyuz and de Meaux’s unique scene of the Soyuz seated in the Kazakhstan desert, which shows its lonely fate in contrast to the flotillas and US space probes generally welcomed by journalists with camera flashes.

Finally, as if it were consenting to the prophetic nature of film trailers, the titles of works appear on the screen. “You Are the Next Astronaut” evokes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968) and tells the story of slack and urban evolution in under two minutes, unlike the typical one and a half hour full-length film.

Just as You Are the Next Astronaut takes the science fiction form to deal with Roman epics in which death and glory are represented by swords and sandals, the trailer lacks an explanation to highlight the fact that it doesn’t provide critical dramatic scenes.
What we get instead is vain praise. One scene, showing stock shots of Roman trumpeters, leads to another, a concert hall where a deaf soloist and backup chorus sing Verdi’s Aida together in sign language. What familiarizes us here is the fact that it is not played but only translated as if the act of translation is the only place where weirdness continues to exist.
You Are the Next Astronaut, Death or Glory, and de Meaux’s third untitled work on Gwangalli Beach in Busan are meant to show that de Meaux’s works apply the language of public places, whereas most artworks in public places tend to apply their unique artistic language.
The artist’s trailers look mundane at first glance. This is the moment to contemplate the relations of reflecting time, space, and capital with more exotic and unusual light.
By Tom Morton (art critic, Frieze Art Magazine, London, the UK)