Babied by the three-minute narratives of MTV, reared on DVDs featuring trailers in the extras menu and content to watch entire films online, many of today's young moviegoers are happy not to go to the movies at all. Instead, it's trailers — and specifically online trailers — that mesmerize: so easy to gulp down dozens in the time it takes to swallow one lousy movie.

No, it's not jaded cynicism at the prospect of too many movies, too little time. The allure of the trailer is the realization that immense power need not come in a 90-minute package. Like the Cold War's minimalist painters, trailer editors should be admired for their ability to filter out society's noise and distill an epic to its essence.

Sure, it's advertising. But often, it's art.

In 1964, Pablo Ferro's trailer for "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb" broke the louder-is-better mold by shuffling title cards into a slide show of random clips from the Stanley Kubrick film, and setting it all to the syncopated flutter of a beat poet's conga drum. By breaking away from narrative, and editing in a deliberately jarring manner, the final trailer was just as adventurous as the film it advertised. Since then, a certain class of trailers has become more clever, more intricate, more intelligent.

The trailer for "Birth," a 2004 Nicole Kidman movie that opened to mixed reviews, is a masterpiece in gray-green, a swirling glide through snowy Central Park bridges and silky wallpapered East Side interiors. It skips and plays tricks where the movie just lumbers: The actress' sobby narration over a collapsing figure makes us wonder whether she is falling, or if the fallen is the one she mourns. The music crescendos as it reveals the actual quartet playing the song — and then gives way to a surreal, muted fight scene.

For "Gerry," Gus Van Sant's 2002 drama of two friends lost in a desert, the trailer doesn't attempt to boil down the entire film. Instead, it draws out a few quiet, intimate moments between the actors and then turns to showcase the violet hills of the desert. The result is less teaser, more short film.

It's absolutely gorgeous.

The artful trailers stand apart from those that seem to rely on the same tired formula, like the ad for the "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequel — it's mostly cut-and-paste fiery explosions and candlelit love scenes to the heartbeat rhythm of an MTV video. But mass-market movies can have great trailers, too. What seems like a typical horror advertisement for 2004's remake of "Dawn of the Dead" surprises when what's on screen begins to buzz and shift — is someone upstairs playing with the projector? — the reel bubbles and burns out (achieving the effect of a Stan Brakhage short film), and what seems like smoke in front of the beam begins to lift.

ONLINE TRAILERS

Trailers are increasingly getting their due. This is the seventh year of the Golden Trailer Awards (the Oscar of trailers); 20th Century Fox used a trailer to announce its movie, "The Simpsons." "This is the first film I ever remember where we announced the start of production through a teaser-trailer," said Pam Levine, president of domestic theatrical marketing at Fox.

Web sites showcasing trailers have become popular, drawing users who view the site as entertainment in itself. "There is absolutely a trend of people who watch every trailer and who just love trailers," said Doug Werner, manager of www.Apple.com /trailers.

A 31-year-old self-declared "fanboy" and "geek" from Arizona, Christopher Stipp claims that he watches "everything on the (Apple) Web site, every week." His online column, "Trailer Park," is on www.quickstop entertainment.com, a Web site created by filmmaker Kevin Smith. "My first impulse is to pick up the phone and call a friend and say, 'Hey, check this out,' " Stipp says.

MIT grad Christopher Beland admitted to staying up until the wee hours watching trailers. "Online, it can get a little dangerous because there's an almost unlimited supply. ... Before I know it, it's 3 a.m. and the adrenaline has worn off and I'm exhausted."

Beland posted his idea to "create a television station that will be all trailers, all the time" to an online forum of entrepreneurial ideas, and received an enthusiastic reception (11 votes for the channel, one against). And why not a TV station? There are already trailers in DVD form for sale online. Compilations of '70s camp trailers, such as "Mad Ron's Prevues from Hell" (zombie flicks) and "Bride of Trailer Camp" (female villains) are "greatest hits" albums for the trailer-obsessed.

And trailers are being collected as art, as well.

Greg McClatchy, president of Motor Entertainment, a trailer and advertising post-production house, always thought collecting trailers was crazy. "Before they were like weird collectors. ... They'd have a 35mm print as part of their collection, and chances are they didn't have a 35mm projector to run it. It was an object. Like collecting vinyl or something. Now, with broadband, it's different."

Sites that showcase trailers have evolved from giant advertisements to giant libraries. Turner Classic Movies' Web site has an impressive collection of old trailers, including one for "The Night of the Iguana," with its dramatic voice-over from a young James Earl Jones. The number of hits a trailer gets falls steadily after the film is released, so it's relatively cheap to keep trailers available online in "archives" sections — a name that implies these are works that merit preservation.

"The trailer finally has the same life span as the film," said Michael Shapiro, a trailer editor who made "Coming Attractions," a documentary about the history of the form. "...You can look at these trailers, and enjoy them as a piece of film in themselves."

Trailers that are online, in particular, give the makers more freedom for creativity. Theatrical trailers cannot be longer than 2 1/2 minutes to comply with Motion Picture Association of America rules, but online they often run more. Several versions of the trailer for the 2000 thriller "Final Destination" ran longer online, each focusing on a different character.

TRUE REPRESENTATIONS

Along with artistic freedom comes the likelihood that an online trailer will be a truer representation of a film, argues Gary Faber, executive vice president of marketing at the Weinstein Co. The studio recently released a "Clerks II" trailer that better reflects the profane banter of the final film than the theatrical version. "Let's use the language that's really in there," Faber said. "Let's show the jokes that are really in the film!"

When trailers aren't a true representation of the film, fans make their own versions. The video site YouTube is fostering a grass-roots art form: the "hack-up" movie trailer. Some are polished re-edits of an existing trailer while others are home-video restagings set in suburban basements, with brooms for light sabers.

Studios also are paying attention to these sites. "We get comments that people are posting, like, 'I thought she was in this movie.' So we'll put her in the next trailer," said Faber, who monitors sites including YouTube.

The editors of trailervision .com have taken the form one step further: They edit trailers for movies "that never existed," according to their Web site. Take "The Immortals," a "Trailervision Truvie" — a fictional documentary trailer shot in a real situation — in which filmmakers re-imagine an actual riot in Quebec to be a war between mortal people and a select race of immortal men. "We saw the trailer as a new medium," the site's editors wrote in a statement about their concept, "often better than the movies they advertise."

Reflecting on the experimental era of trailer-making of the '60s, Shapiro, the trailer-editor-cum-trailer-historian, said: "These young people started trying to make a trailer not just a marketing tool — these were people who aspired to be filmmakers, and not just a trailer maker at a studio. They tried to bring a filmmaking technique to it. An Act 1, an Act 2, an Act 3. And that's what audiences consider to be a piece of entertainment." Or even, art.

TRAILER SITES WORTH VISITING

Where to get your trailer fix:
www.themoviebox.net — A one-stop shop of links to the most popular trailer sites.

www.tcm.com/multimedia/featuredtrailers — A virtual library of retro trailers from the '30s to the '90s.

www.apple.com/trailers — A streamlined showcase for trailers for films dating from 1998.

www.videodetective.com — A trailers-only site, searchable by release date, popularity and alphabetical order.

www.trailervision.com — Trailers for movies that (we're not making this up) don't actually exist.

www.youtube.com — Where users post their own edits or reenactments of studio trailers (search under keyword "trailer.")