Scopitone
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Scopitone was a trendy invention of the 1960s, a jukebox with a 16 mm film component, the forgotten forerunner of music video.
Color 16 mm film clips with a magnetic soundtrack were designed to be shown on a Scopitone film jukebox. The first Scopitones were made in France around 1960: Johnny Hallyday covered Los Bravos' "Black is Black" (as "Noir c'est noir") and the "Hully Gully" was danced round the edge of a French swimming pool. The Scopitone fad spread to West Germany, where the Kessler Sisters burst out of twin steamer trunks to sing "Quando Quando" on the dim screen that surmounted the jukebox. The fad soon spread to England. Scopitone was a draw in selected upscale bars and pubs. Scopitone appeared in a few New York City bars in the summer of 1964. Procol Harum made a Scopitone of "A Whiter Shade Of Pale". In another Scopitone recording Dionne Warwick lay on a white shag rug with an offstage fan blowing to sing "Walk on By". (The obvious artifice of such scenes led Susan Sontag to identify Scopitone films as "part of the canon of Camp" in her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'".)
By the end of the 1960s, the popularity of the Scopitone had all but disappeared. The last film for a Scopitone was made at the end of 1978. As of 2006, the only public scopitone within the US is located at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, Tennessee.
The 2002 movie Punch Drunk Love prominently features Scopitone imagery.
