yo comence la broma ---BEE GEES bee gess I started the joke - yo comence la broma ---BEE GEES bee gess I started the joke

What this video is

Released in late 1968 as a single from the album Idea, 'I Started a Joke' represents the Bee Gees at the peak of their first artistic phase — a melancholic baroque-pop ballad led by Robin Gibb's idiosyncratic vibrato. The promotional film, produced as part of a German television special but shot in Brussels under the direction of French avant-garde television auteur Jean-Christophe Averty, situates the band within…

Why it matters

A canonical example of late-1960s British baroque-pop, the video represents an early intersection of pop promotion and European avant-garde television craft. Averty's use of graphic overlays and composite imagery prefigures techniques later common in 1980s music video production, making this a…

The director

Jean-Christophe Averty (6 August 1928 – 4 March 2017) was a French television and radio director regarded as a pioneer of European video art. A graduate of the IDHEC film school, he began his television career in 1952 at the French Television Office and…