CANZONI CON VISTA: MEZZO SECOLO DI VIDEOCLIP/

SONGS WITH A VIEW: VIDEOCLIPS IN HALF A CENTURY

In the exhibition the original Cinebox and Scopitone over 500 classic colour movies, more than 700 pictures and posters with artists testimonials of these machines that invented the songs videopromotion.

curated by Michele Bovi

2008 November 8 - 16

opening times: every day from 5.00 pm to 11.00 pm

Palazzo Venezia – Sala Mappamondo Via del Plebiscito, 118 - Roma

The video-clip celebrates half a century anniversary. At its origins it used to be a movie with colours realised for Cineboxes, juke-boxes with screens produced in Italy. Luigi Tenco, Giorgio Gaber, Bobby Solo, Fausto Leali, Tony Renis, Gianni Morandi, but also Vittorio De Sica and the American Frankie Avalon, have been testimonials for the Cinebox, the machine that in 1959 was presented in the market as the “cine-musical bomb of the century”. The Cinebox transmitted the ancestors of the modern videoclip. Therefore a rigorous tri-coloured primogeniture for the most traditional advertising tool of songs. The first musical film was realized not in New York, nor in Hollywood or London but in Rome in 1958, thanks to the agreement between Piero Granelli, a professional inventor, and Paolo Emilio Nistri, a delegate advisor of the Ottico Meccanica Itlaliana, a leader enterprise in Europe for optical instruments of high tech. With this agreement the Cinebox adventure started off, the juke-box with images, for which it was created the use of film with colours of 3 minutes long. In the Seventies this took the name of video-clip. The device was presented in April 1959 at the Circolo della Stampa Romana in Palazzo Morignoli and in the next two months it was put on show in the Milan Fair and Rome Fair (that took place in the new site in via Cristoforo Colombo). The first films were interpreted by Renato Corosone, Don Marino Barreto Jr, Domenico Modugno, Peppino Di Capri, Nilla Pizzi, Tonina Torrielli, Wera Nepi. One year later Nistri made over the project to Angelo Bottani, an entrepreneur from Milan, that used to collaborate with Angelo Moratti, the president of football team Inter. Moratti was able through the SIF (Società Internazionale di Fonovisione), with headquarters in Milan (Via Matteotti 10), to present and introduce the device in the international scenario. The initiative triggered a commercial war between Italy and France (that one year later after the invention of the Cinebox, introduced a similar device called the Scopitone) and United States and an extraordinary artistic production started from emerging directors, like Claude Lelouch, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, our Vito Molinari and Enzo Trapani. All of this in a frame that witnessed as main characters Cosa Nostra and the families of Vito Genovese and Lucky Luciano. The Anti-crime commission directed by the senator Robert Kennedy decreted the end of the adventure. The exhibition is fully dedicated to the history of Cinebox and Scopitone in the Sala Mappamondo of Palazzo Venezia in Rome during the Festival of Palazzo Venezia. Four of the original devices are exhibited – 2 Cinebox, 1 French Scopitone and 1 American Scopitone. All of them are perfectly functioning and each one contains 40 original films with colours and original texts; hundreds of original pictures and posters showing Italian artists and foreigners testimonial of Cinebox (from Giorgio Gaber to Gianni Morandi, from Vittorio De Sica to Frankie Avalon); over 500 films of Cinebox and Scopitone in continuous reproduction.