A narrator sits in the entrance hall of a big cineplex movie theater and narrates from his memory the story of the second book from the three-part phantasy novel „The Lord of The Rings“ by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The film starts with two minutes of a low quality internet film trailer taken from the Chinese internet announcing the second episode „Lord of the Rings II“ of the movie trilogy for the fall. The first (and only) scene shows a narrator sitting at a coffeetable in the entrance hall of a cineplex movie theater, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes while telling the story of „The Lord of The Rings II: The Two Towers“ by J.R.R. Tolkien, just by recalling his memory of reading the book in his childhood. Visible in the back are two neon-lit escalators where cineplex visitors are going up and down. The 88 minutes film is shot in one single take.

PREVIEW was filmed in January 2002 when the first epiode of Lord of the Rings was just released a month earlier and the second episode was still due in the coming Fall/Winter of 2002/2003.

Regarded as the ultimate phantasy product the book The Lord of The Rings was thought „unfilmable“ for quite some time due to its strong pictorial imagination. Finally in 2001 Peter Jackson actually filmed the three parts of the trilogy The Lord of The Rings, for visual continuity all at the same time. Then each episode was released with a one year delay from Dec 2001 to Dec 2003 (always at christmas time) to create a commercial hype and accomplish the marketing strategies for merchandising and video sales. This industrialized structure of artificial tension created a vacuum of expectation and anticipation which seemed ideal for a subversive intervention.

PREVIEW replaces the fancy Hollywood visualisation with „pictureless“ personal narration, formally relocating the imagination in its subjective interpretation. In placing the narrator in a cineplex theater entrance hall, the market place of the industrialized picture-generating machinery delivers the backdrop and „reality foil“ for the minor individual subjective narration. The narrator not only „delivers“ the story but actually also expresses personal thoughts for reception, and now and then he even gives political comments on the events. So, switching between narrative levels the narrator adds his personal perspective and individuality to the story, thus opening even wider the gap to the „authoritarian“ form of Hollywood movie storytelling. In a way the personal narration in this „phantasy film“ also alters the receptive attitude of the audience as through the deficit of „image furnishing“ the viewer may switch from a passive receptive attitude to active imagining.