Scopitone

From Dead Media Archive
Revision as of 07:41, 26 April 2010 by Jessiehyojin (Talk | contribs)

Jump to: navigation, search
Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination
Scopitone
“Before music videos and MTV there was their great-granddaddy, Scopitone.”

(San Francisco Chronicle, Mar 19, 1992)

Brief Description

Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination
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.

How it works

In 1939, a device called a "Panoram" was invented by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago. The Panoram played eight three-minute musical shorts in a wooden jukebox fitted with a 17 x 22.5 inch translucent screen.

The image was projected in a rear-screen manner via 16mm black and white film. These shorts became known as "soundies" and starred many of the most well-known jazz acts of the day. When World War II erupted, production halted and by war's end, the craze that had captured the public's attention so much in 1939 and 1940 was totally over.

After the war ended in Europe, two French technicians saw all the tons of war surplus and military spare parts lying around and decided to use some of it to recreate the soundie experience and, hopefully, improve upon it. Using a 16mm camera that had been used by the French Air Force for reconnaissance flights, they converted it into a 16mm projector.

Mastering the problems of providing enough light and devising reliable mechanisms for threading and rewinding the films cost them lots of time and it wasn't until the late '50s that the invention was ready for the public.

The resultant machine was the size of a refrigerator and was dubbed "Scopitone." Much improved from the 1939 version, the Scopitone played color films and, like a conventional jukebox, the customer was able to choose which video to watch, instead of whatever was conveniently loaded on the machine.