Photos: Classiq Journal
“This is the Kind of Museum I Want to Make!”
A museum that is interesting and which relaxes the soul
A museum where much can be discovered
A museum based on a clear and consistent philosophy
A museum where those seeking enjoyment can enjoy,
those seeking to ponder can ponder, and those seeking to feel can feel
A museum that makes you feel more enriched
when you leave than when you entered!
To make such a museum, the building must be…
Put together as if it were a film
Not arrogant, magnificent, flamboyant, or suffocating
Quality space where people can feel at home,
especially when it’s not crowded
A building that has a warm feel and touch
A building where the breeze and sunlight can freely flow through
The museum must be run in such a way that…
Small children are treated as if they were grown-ups
Visitors with disabilities are accommodated as much as possible
The staff can be confident and proud of their work
Visitors are not controlled with predetermined courses and fixed directions
It is suffused with ideas and new challenges
so that the exhibits do not get dusty or old,
and that investments are made to realise that goal.
[…]
This is the kind of museum I don’t want to make!
A pretentious museum
An arrogant museum
A museum that treats its contents
as if they were more important than people
A museum that displays uninteresting works as if they were significant.”
Hayao Miyazaki
Executive Director
Ghibli Museum, Mitaka
(Read the whole This kind of museum… manifesto)
Viewing
It Was Just An Accident, 2025
While in prison, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi started to write a story centered on the idea of what would happen if one of the people he met in prison was released and came face to face to one of those who tortured and humiliated them while incarcerated. And that is the problem Vahid, one of the characters, is facing in the film that won the Palme d’Or last year, when he captures someone whom he has reason to believe is the one who had tortured him in prison. It may be just a minor accident but which, nonetheless, through skillfully melding social satire and comic moments, builds up tension and sets in motion a swirl of events to shocking, thought-provoking effect.
Le corniaud, 1965
Gérard Oury
Bourvil is Antoine Marechal, the perfect personification of the everyday Frenchman who is looking forward to leaving on vacation by car to Italy, only to have a crash as soon as he drives off. Louis de Funès is Leopold Saroyan, a generous industrialist who, supposedly regretting his being the cause of the accident, lends Marechal his Cadillac which he must bring back from Italy. Saroyan is in fact a gangster whose plan is to use the car to smuggle valuable stuff to France. While the honest man enjoys his vacation, rival gangs crash, unbeknownst to him, over the precious car. A classic gangster story, with car chases, plot twists, confrontations and misunderstandings, that takes on a different tone because of the two leading characters played by two of the best comedic actors in the history of cinema. “There are no more different temperaments than those of Bourvil and Louis de Funès,” Gérard Oury remarked. “One practices humour with sensitivity and discretion, the other explodes in gags and ludicrous effects. My only problem was channeling this torrent of burlesque without stifling it.” He succeeded very elegantly. And yet, lingering on Bourvil’s comedic talent here and in general, I can not help thinking in the opposite direction, when Jean-Pierre Melville brilliantly cast him against type as inspector Mattei in his heist story from 1970, Le cercle rouge.
La règle du jeu, 1939, and Gosford Park, 2001 (double bill)
I recently set out to watch a Jean Renoir retrospective, began with La règle du jeux and then went for a weekend afternoon double bill, watching Robert Altman’s Gosford Park as well. I had already drawn a parallel between the two, titled Dressing the classes: The Rules of the Game and Gosford Park, and was looking forward to revisiting both films. “I learned the rules of the game from The Rules of the Game,” said Robert Altman about Gosford Park (2001), inspired by Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu (1939). On the surface, Renoir’s film takes the superficial form of a country house farce resulted in an accidental death, a case of mistaken identity, while Gosford Park employs the genre of the classic British murder mystery, as defined by Agatha Christie: guests and servants gather at a stately house and one of them is murdered. But just as The Rules of the Game is “a fusion of moral statement and social observation, of comedy and tragedy, of fantasy and cruelty, the culmination of Renoir’s quest for la drame gai“, as Andrè Bazin wrote in the book Jean Renoir, Altman uses the setting of the murder mystery but surpasses its limitations and makes it his own, a sardonic, deeply layered story of greed, snobbery, eccentricity and class exploitation. Two satires of two different societies and cultures.
Crime 101, 2026
Bart Layton
I knew absolutely nothing about this film when I went to see it at the cinema, only that Mark Ruffalo, Nick Nolte, Halle Berry and Barry Keoghan were part of the cast – and that was my selling ticket. I am a cinephile, I love so many films, from the 1920s to the 2020s, for so many different reasons, and I think this monthly round-up is a testament to that. Crime 101 is a highly entertaining heist action film, but the take-away from it is a closing sequence with Mark Ruffalo (the honest cop who’s likely to have been mentored by Columbo, in both looks and perseverance) at the wheel of a beautiful racing-green ‘68 Camaro. The way it is filmed, the way we get to see the character in a new light, both figuratively and literally, it’s a scene that belongs entirely to cinema, showing us something special and unique about the character that we couldn’t and shouldn’t have earlier grasped.
Blurry Moon
Anthony Vacarello
The creative director of Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello, launched Saint Laurent Productions in 2023, to support independent filmmakers, from short films by Almodóvar to Jim Jarmusch’s latest Father Mother Sister Brother. Vaccarello further tightens the fashion houses’s connection to cinema, not in the least in recognition of Yves Saint Laurent’s remarkable contribution to film costume – most notably, Yves Saint Laurent dressed Catherine Deneuve in Buñuel’s “Belle de jour” and in Truffaut’s “Mississippi Mermaid”, and Romy Schneider in Chabrol’s “Innocents with Dirty Hands” and in Claude Sautet’s both “César et Rosalie” and “Max et les ferrailleurs”.
In his latest project, Blurry Moon (you can watch it here), a short film he made for Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello went behind the camera and directed Charlotte Gainsbourg in Los Angeles, at the wheel of a car, on the legendary Mulholland Drive, creating “an atmosphere both intimate and cinematic, inspired by Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti – an offbeat tribute to Hollywood’s daydreams and illusions.”
Reading
La Piscine, edited by Luc Larriba, about the making of Jacques Deray’s film. An essential book for film aficionados.
Listening
The podcast: Monocle on Design
The Album: Surrealistic Pillow – Jefferson Airplane
Making
I usually dedicate this feature to a maker – designer, artist, creative of any kind – and his/her craft. But the idea of making an ad-free documentary brand magazine that dives deep into one single brand in each issue completely gauged my interest. Launched in 2011 and published in two languages, Korean and English, Magazine B selects the brands to be featured from all around the world based on four standards: aesthetic, practicality, accessible price point, and brand philosophy. I’m presently running a personal contest to choose the best cover so far. Among the runners-up are the issues dedicated to: Wilson, Guinness, Lego, Penguin and Tsutaya.
Exploring
Ghibli Museum, where I found the Hayao Miyazaki’s manifesto written at the beginning of this newsletter, has been on my mind a lot lately. Especially that I believe there are not enough cultural spaces that are kids-friendly, at least not at this level: celebrating originality, encouraging creativity, fostering imagination, welcoming play. They have a small cinema inside the museum as well (naturally). It is called The Saturn Theater, it has only about 80 seats, and it screens short animated films from Studio Ghibli. A blue sky and lots of colorful flowers are drawn on the ceiling and walls. When the film ends, the windows open and the sunshine comes in.
A country that values education and culture is the one that is truly ahead of others in the most meaningful way.
On an end note
And here is more: Mastering the art of deep listening in Japan. In the warm glow of the country’s jazz cafés, a subculture of vinyl aficionados is cultivating the kind of shared sensory experiences that our noisy world has forgotten.
“Jazz kissas are a purely Japanese invention. Originating in the late 1920s, and popular throughout the ’60s and ’70s, they went into decline as home audio systems became more accessible. But the past decade has seen a surge of interest in the jazz cafés from young record collectors and audiophiles. In an age when music is a digital utility piped in through earbuds, visiting kissas has become popular among music fans in Japan and something of a pilgrimage for Westerners like me – all of us looking for a chance to experience listening as an act of veneration, appreciation, and fellowship.” It is belonging to a like-minds community, collective attention, social bonding, and ultimately a quintessential (counter)cultural experience, the act of sitting together becoming part of what makes us human. In that regard, I am looking forward to seeing Nick Dwyer’s ten-years-in-the-making documenting series about kissas A Century in Sound.
The regulars
The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Ruthie’s Table 4 with Ruth Rogers. Fashion Neurosis, with Bella Freud. My New Roots monthly newsletter. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.
