Scopitone

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“Before music videos and MTV there was their great-granddaddy, Scopitone.”

(San Francisco Chronicle, Mar 19, 1992)

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Scopitone


Brief Description

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Scopitone


Today we take music videos on MTV and VH1 for granted. But did you know these musical cinematic gems have roots dating back to the start of World War II? And that they developed out of a "visual jukebox" called a Scopitone which was fashionable in the early 1960's?

Invented in France right after World War Ⅱ, Scopitone were short 16mm films named after the modified jukeboxes they used to be player on. The first Scopitones were made in France in 1960. The ancestors of music videos, they hit their golden age in the early ‘60s, neatly concinciding with the explosion of teen-driven pop music in both France and the United States, the two main purveyors of the genre.

Judging by this selection of almost 30 short films, there were two basic schools of Scopitones: the one where the singers were surrounded by bikini-clad, buxom vixens frantically twisting on location, and the one where you dropped the same indefatigable dancers into ostentatiously fake-looking sets. They run the gamut, from the Exciters singing “Tell Him” to the Kessler Sisters, blond twins who were regulars on European variety shows and whose Scopitone is a grandiose exercise in Teutonic kitsch.