Just like everyone, I love movie trailers, those that entice and don’t give away the whole story at a glance. That book trailers can do something similar, is a fairly new idea, but more authors are playing with the new medium. We live in the audiovisual age!

My Paris memoir has 130 vintage photographs, which I picked from the huge crate of photos I schlepped with me from my European life. Combining photos and text has always been my violon d’Ingres, as French has it: my hobby horse. I used to do multimedia shows in Europe, then I created the photobiography Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures. Now Kiss Me Again, Paris, a photo-illustrated memoir.

But I might not have thought of a book trailer, hadn’t I seen a brilliant little film of a poem written by a friend, Joan Gelfand, from her book, The Long Blue Room. A poem and a poetry reading were turned into video in such a poetic and artful way that I spontaneously said, Wow, if only I could do something like that with my Paris photographs for the book! A book trailer could be a new form of a calling card, I thought. Images can say so much more than words, and in no time at all.

Talk about inspiration. The unlikely happened: the video artist, Dana Walden, read the book and fell in love, he said, with the woman in red who runs up the stairs at the Paris Opera in my story… He set to work, and out came a mini-film, three minutes filled with the nostalgia of youth, with dreams of longing, sex, and beautiful women. As Dana is also a composer, a haunting musical collage of saxophone and accordion waltzes accompanies the collage of film and still images.

I am thrilled to be able to share it with you all:

Find out more about Renate and where to pre-order the book click HERE