![]() ![]() There was usually a plot, or at least something creative going on other than just pointing a camera at a stage. “The films were generally three-minutes long, during which a popular song was acted out in some sort of fanciful way. Then in 19, two different machines came out, one in Italy and one in France. “For a long time, there wasn’t anything like that on the market. Not surprisingly, given these limitations, the Panoram disappeared right after the war. You just put in your money and got whatever was next in line.” They ran on a continuous loop wheel of, I think, eight films. The films were in black and white, but the real big difference was that you couldn’t select the film you wanted to see. It looked much like a Scopitone, with a self-contained 16-millimeter film unit inside and a little screen on top. “During World War II,” says Orlowsky, “people watched ‘soundies’ on a machine called the Panoram, which was made by the Mills Company. “Of the American films shot in Technicolor, the color is as good today as the day it was made.” In fact, Orlowsky was more familiar with the precursor to the Scopitone than he was with the Scopitone itself. “Scopitones were like this secret treasure trove of films from early rock ’n’ roll and the Vegas lounge era,” he says. When the French Scopitone (top) was introduced in the United States, a Chicago company called Tel-a-Sign redesigned the machine’s exterior (above) but left the mechanical insides almost the same.Ī self-described “music hound,” Orlowsky was particularly interested in footage of performers whose heyday was before his time. I bought it, got hooked, and started collecting the original films.” “I had sort of forgotten about Scopitone until I noticed somebody selling a bootleg videotape of Scopitone films. They were kind of hard to track down in the pre-Internet days.” The films listed on the machine sounded intriguing, but I never got to see any of them until much later. ![]() “I first heard about Scopitones in the early 1980s,” he recalls, “when I saw a broken machine at Busvan for Bargains in San Francisco. He was not one of the leisure-suited swells pictured in the Scopitone advertisements of the day. Their reign, if you can even call it that, was brief, and by the end of the decade, the novelty of these then-high-tech devices had faded entirely.īob Orlowsky, a “recovering attorney” who runs a site called Scopitone Archive, collects the films that were the software for these machines. The contraption in question was usually a Scopitone, one of several audio-visual jukeboxes found primarily in bars. Note: if you have a Spotify account, log on to your account in a different tab on your internet browser, to hear the full song below.Before MTV, and long before we could stream music videos on our cell phones, mid-1960s American hepcats gathered around 500-pound, 7-foot-high contraptions to watch 16-millimeter Technicolor films of B-list pop stars gyrating to their latest hits. I’ve also included hit French songs sung by artists of other nationalities. I should note there are no English songs by French artists such as Daft Punk or David Guetta on the list since the focus here is on famous French songs, not songs by French artists. To give the list some coherence, while not ranking the songs in order by what we consider “the best” (because that would really incur the debate-hounds), I’ve ranked the songs by release date. Certain French musicians dominated the charts for decades, while others were one-hit-wonders that are still crowd-pleasers today.Ĭhanson – Song French – English translation We’ve had plenty of discussions chez nous as to how to put together classic and recent hits while including a good mix of singers and musicians. How do you decide? French music and songs that are popular and have stood the test of time to transcend their genre. All information provided is for entertainment purposes only, see our disclosure policy.)Ī list of famous French songs is always going to cause plenty of debate. ![]() (As an Amazon affiliate, we may earn commissions on purchases. ![]()
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