The amazing French concert video site Blogotheque is blowing up— and well it should! MTV did a piece on it recently (featuring a be-wigged Jonathan Morris) that emphasized the site’s collaboration with Zach Condon, the guy behind the band Beirut.

The heart of the site is its growing list of “Concerts a Emporter” or as it’s translated at the site “Take Away Concerts” (although for Americans it would be more like “Take Out Concerts” or “Concerts To Go.”) These video performances are recorded live in and around Paris with bands passing through. They’re a YouTube-generation answer to MTV and make the slick production and lipsynching that has characterized videos since their inception seem comically anachronistic.

Vincent Moon, the site’s founder and the director of the Emporter videos, makes no bones about his ambitions, baldly referencing great French film experiments of the past. The site name “Blogotheque,” for example, points back to the innovative and enormously influential work of Henry Langlois who founded La Cinémathèque in the 1930s, a tiny operation that came to house the largest collection of international films in the world and that served basically as the classroom for nearly every major French filmmaker and critic in the last half of the past century, including Resnais, Truffaut, Godard—everybody!

The videos themselves, a new one of which appears every monday, I think, are more like film shorts. They feature random conversation and Godard-style flashing block-letter titles. Moon talks to the bands as they walk around the city looking for places to play. On a hill in Montmartre. Outside a cafe. In the metro. In the back of a theater. The spaces are cramped, like the film frame, and it’s all handheld. The sound is good but not touched-up. Cars pass. Glasses clink. People fall down. Tourists take photos. It’s great stuff, the collection of films growing into something like a chronicle of a movement. Brush up on your French, too, because the short introductions Moon writes to accompany the films are great—personal, anecdotal, insightful.

Moon says he’s happy and complimented that the concept is being taken up in cities like San Francisco and Austin and New York. As the idea moves beyond Paris, the variety of artists will no doubt also expand. Check it. Blogotheque is a Top Five with a bullet.