C. Spencer Yeh

As a member of the Brooklyn microcinema collective Spectacle, C. Spencer Yeh edited 123 movie trailers to promote screenings between 2012 and 2020. Compiled as a 240-minute video, 123 Trailers for Spectacle is non-chronological, except for the first and the last trailers Yeh made, which bookend the epic collection. Spectacle’s programming maps a cultural space where grindhouse fare–low-budget science-fiction, horror, dark comedy, and action–overlaps with the avant-garde. The product of an abiding passion for film culture at its most inventive and extreme, Spectacle screenings celebrate cult auteurs and cinematic visionaries.  

The exercise of editing brief trailers from feature-length films is a meticulous task, demanding a disproportionate amount of time and effort relative to the potential audience for Spectacle’s cinema, which can seat fewer than 40 people. For Yeh, an artist, composer, and improvisor, the project of creating trailers became an unusual vehicle for self-expression rather than solely a promotional venture. By choosing what to include and what to omit from a pre-existing film made by another artist, Yeh managed to construct short works that reflect his own identity and concerns. According to Yeh: “this work is kinda a weird way of trying to define and present oneself, because it is tied to an intimate dialogue with the long conversation with the trailers being cut, as well as the theater itself.” Working within a collective and often without explicit permission from the filmmakers he was promoting, Yeh created formally striking works that are personally meaningful, ethically ambiguous, and grounded in the complex social dynamics of artistic collaboration.