Eurovision Song Contest 1964 (partially found broadcast footage; 1964)

Winner of 1964 Contest: Gigliola Cinquetti.

Status: Partially Found

The 1964 Eurovision Song Contest was held at the Tivolis Koncertsal in Copenhagen, Denmark, on March 21, 1964. The contest was inspired by Italy's Sanremo Music Festival, and has been held since 1956 (footage from the 1956 event is also lost).

The contest was hosted by Lotte Waever, featuring 16 singers from different countries performing one song each; an interval act performed by the Ballet-Harlequinade; and a reprise of the winner's song. The winner that year was Gigliola Cinquetti from Italy, with a total score of 49 points for her song "Non ho L'eta".^[1]

The 1964 contest was overshadowed by a political protest that happened mid-show: before the Belgian entry's performance, a man stormed the stage with a sign reading "Boycott Franco and Salazar". That year's contest was Portugal's debut in Eurovision, with several protesters demanding that the right-wing military dictatorships of Spain and Portugal be excluded from the contest. While the protester was removed from the stage, the camera panned to a shot of the scoreboard.

A common misconception, even repeated by Eurovision's official website, is that the host broadcaster DR (Danmarks Radio) lost its recordings of the 1964 contest in a fire. While DR broadcasted the show live from 1957 to 1966, they did not record any of the shows in those years.^[2] Supposedly, the BBC had a tape canister of the 1964 contest labeled "Eurovision 1964" during a storage cleanup, but the tape is missing and is presumably wiped.

Several rumors have spawned about the 1964 contest. One account claimed that a 16mm recording had been "unearthed" in Malta and the full reprise of Cinquetti's winning song had been found in Germany. No sources have been cited and none of it seems to have surfaced online. Apparently, however, there is a listing of the 1964 contest in the INA, or Institut national de l'audiovisuel (French for National Audiovisual Institute), which is a repository of all French radio, television, and audiovisual archives. This can mean that a copy of the song contest is in French media archives, but that it isn't available to be viewed online. Still, the full recording of the song contest is not found, unless either one of the recordings stated above are posted online.

The full radio broadcast and intact photos of the contest are found and can be easily found online. The only footage of the contest as of now, is the reprise of the song, "Non ho L'eta" filmed by an audience member and a few segments of the show from the German broadcasting network, NDR, that exist. (Gigliola Cinquetti's first performance are shown in the third video (14:57-15:36) and the few segments from NDR are shown throughout the first video)

Lost Media Wiki user EBroca came across the opening of the contest plus a few scenes from the beginning of the show. The footage is from the host broadcaster, DR. It also shows the footage of the reprise from the perspective of the man who filmed it. The footage of the full contest, including the footage of all the performance of the participants, are still, unfortunately, missing. There is also a video (2nd video) with some behind the scenes footage and the history of ESC 1964, however, the video is in Danish.