Glacial Errata, No. 79

One: Calendar Girl

In her 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag lists, among her canon of Camp objects, “Scopitone films,” which led me to the question, “What’s a Scopitone film?” You may have never wondered that question! But maybe you’re wondering it now!

Well, here’s an answer for you: A forerunner of music videos, the Scopitone was a specialized jukebox that could show short 16mm films synced to magnetic reels. Unlike competing technologies, Scopitone used Technicolor film printing, and created these visually rich, oddly disjointed films that for a short period were wildly popular, before disappearing almost entirely from America’s pop consciousness.

Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others. Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.*

* =All italicized passages are from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.”

Two: Locomotion

The Scopitone was patented in 1958, and the films were originally produced in France. They spread first to West Germany, and then to the United States, where they were installed primarily in bars and adult establishments to avoid competing with jukeboxes, which were aimed at teenagers. The first one in the United States debuted in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, installed by businessman Alvin Malnick. Initially showing French films, Malnick soon turned to Debbie Reynolds’ production company, Harmony Productions, to shoot domestic films.

By 1964, when Sontag was writing about camp, there were 500 Scopitone jukeboxes in the United States.

Camp tastes turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different—a supplementary—set of standards.

Three: The Silencer

Popular for a time, they were eventually passed by precisely because they eschewed the teenage market; The Beatles, for example, didn’t bother with Scopitones, going straight to TV. Eventually, they faded from popularity and by the end of the 1960s, were pretty much done.

(This Scopitone for Joi Lansing’s “The Silencer” is great for any number of reasons, but don’t miss the shots of the LA skies in the background, where you can get a very clear—so to speak—picture of just how terrible the air quality used to be. Clean air regulations! They work!)

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.

Four: Radiation Baby (My Teenage Fallout Queen)

This website is a pretty comprehensive listing of all the various songs that were recorded for Scopitone, if you want to go deeper. And there are a lot more of these videos on Youtube…

Third Man Records in Nashville, meanwhile appears to still have a working Scopitone, the only one open to the general public.

(Just gonna say that this George McKelvey novelty is by far the most upsetting of the bunch, a must watch.)

Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn’t propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

Five: Quando, Quando

There is still a guy in Maryland, named Dick Hack(!), who repairs Scopitones (among other jukeboxes), so if you happen to come across one in a dusty antique store….

Thus, things are campy, not when they become old—but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt. But the effect of time is unpredictable.