Photos: Classiq Journal
“I need to be where the light fills me up.
It’s an impossibility for me to thrive creatively without
strong natural light. If you are painting or creating in a way
where this is what feeds you, then you must find a pathway to it..”
Heather Chontos, Classiq Journal Interviews
Viewing
Libeled Lady, 1935
Jack Conway
One of the things that give me the greatest joys is seeing William Powell and Myrna Loy together on screen. Their believable romanticism as Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies was novelty to the silver screen in the 1930s. They starred in ten movies together, the most prolific partnership in the history of cinema. “We weren’t acting, we were just two people in perfect harmony,” William Powell described their perfect compatibility on screen. Myrna Loy herself was a novelty to the silver screen of the time. This is how Richard Schickel rounds up her portrait in the documentary Myrna Loy: So Nice to Come Home to: “She was something new in the movies. She wasn’t a vamp, a vixen or a victim. She wasn’t a screwball, and she wasn’t a siren. She was, of all things to find in the movies in those days, a grown-up woman. Shrewd without being sharp, funny without being silly, decorous without being stuffy, and sexy but in the subtlest, loveliest ways. She represented the distilled essence of her own character.”
I love it that there was a time when comedies were contenders for best film of the year. But, it was another time and it was another Hollywood. And the Hollywood screwball comedies of the 30s were in a league of their own. In Libeled Lady, starring Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow alongside Powell and Myrna Loy, timing and tone transform small, common phrases into witty jokes, wonderful minor characters are indispensable to the story, spontaneity and playfulness are part of life, the ability to laugh at oneself is a trait of character, and a glorious sense of humour comes so very natural – it is so freeing, not censored by the so many labels that are suffocating our society today. The jokes can easily run away with the film, and that’s perfectly okay, but there are a few moments when with just one look, in a flash, that you may miss if you aren’t paying attention, William Powell makes us want to trade a kingdom for his thoughts. Subtlety lies not just in the jokes. And last but not least, there is the timeless, vivacity and glamour of characters and actors alike, in an incredible synergy of costume, character and individual star.
Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol, 2025
Sylvain Chomet
Directed by Sylvain Chomet, the animated biopic about the childhood and career of legendary filmmaker, playwright and storyteller Marcel Pagnol, will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2025 as a special screening, before its theatrical release in October 2025. At the press conference on April 10, 2025, Thierry Frémeaux, director of the festival, stated: “Sylvain Chomet, one of the great voices, one of the great hands of French animation, will present Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol. 70 years ago, the Palme d’Or was born, awarded by Marcel Pagnol, then President of the Jury. A jury president who was more of an academician than the extraordinary filmmaker he was, since at the time it was often academicians who were jury presidents. Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol is a kind of biopic of Marcel Pagnol, the writer, the filmmaker, the destiny of a man from the South of France. I’d like to salute Nicolas Pagnol’s efforts in caring for his grandfather, and say that at Cannes Classics we’ll also have an extraordinary restored version of Pagnol’s Merlusse.”
About his unique project, Sylvain Chomet (The Illusionist, The Triplets of Belleville, The Old Lady and the Pigeons) says: “I have always been very admiring of Marcel Pagnol’s work, so I was immediately captivated by the idea of writing and directing a biopic. Originally, I had imagined a film with archival footage and some animation. In the end, it will be an animated film. For me, Marcel Pagnol was synonymous with childhood; like everyone else, I had read My Father’s Glory. In seeking to make a documentary, I actually discovered another person: a genius who aspires to succeed in the fields accessible to him, centered around writing. He arrives in Paris penniless as an English teacher and meets people from the theater world. From struggle to struggle, he writes Topaze and Marius, which launch his career. Then comes the war and the Germans in France, followed by the post-war period. I couldn’t imagine Pagnol without including in the image the young Marcel, and animation allows for kinds of mise-en-abîme where his child alter ego appears to remind him of his memories. The film will transcribe his universe and trajectory. The young child takes him back to the past to relive everything he experienced, where he came from in Provence, then Paris, and his life as an adult and artist.”
Little Miss Marker, 1980
Walter Bernstein
Funny and heart-warming in equal measures. Walter Matthau as the softest father-figure under that tough guy appearance is hard to resist. And a child knows, feels this kind of stuff. And Julie Andrews is two levels above an act of elegance and grace.
The Apartment, 1960
Billy Wilder
One of the finest satirical comedies, The Apartment is different from the formal plot of romantic comedies, old and new. It has subtlety and an adult sensibility, which is what makes the story so good and poignant and real. It is set around the holidays, but there is no family gathered around the festive table, just two lonely leading characters, played by Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, for whom this is a time as any other time of the year, but the fact that the story is set around the holidays adds a touch of melancholy to it all. Therein lies the beauty and strength of the movie – life comes with good and bad, you can’t have one without the other. At its 65th anniversary this year, this film hasn’t dated one bit.
Reading
No clay season without a proper shoutout. From this year’s Roland Garros official poster, created by Marc-Antoine Mathieu, resembling a comics book page, to be added to the amazing collection of artistic posters from throughout the years, to finally diving into Racquet Magazine: The Book, a great book about tennis (and so much more), to watching the documentary The French, directed by photographer and filmmaker William Klein, who was the first to be grated full and exclusive access to the legendary French Open in 1981, during a crucial moment in history, and, of course, keeping an eye as often as possible on the current matches played on clay, from Monte Carlo to Rome and Roland Garros. But back to the book, it is in fact a collection of some of the best writings from the first four years of Recquet magazine. Founded in 2016 to be the voice of a new tennis boom, Racquet is cultish, relevant (both for tennis and top class journalism), stylish, artistic, offering ideas for the appeal and grit of the tennis game, but just as often lessons in life, resilience and strength.
Bread of Angels is Patti Smith’s new memoir, announced to be released this year in November, in the gap between the Europe and American dates of her 50th anniversary tour of her first album, Horses. Her storied life has already been captured in text in two previous wonderful memoir books, Just Kids, from 2010, and M Train, released five years later, and her writing we’ve been lucky enough to celebrate in other powerful books, such as Woolgathering, Year of the Monkey, Devotion, The Coral Sea, but this new memoir will be the most complete. Much inspired by her parents, as Patti Smith reveals, it is a “bright and dark dance of life”.
Listening
The soundtrack: Pretty in Pink
The podcast: Gone to Timbuktu, with Sophy Roberts, season two.
The album: Lucky Town, Bruce Springsteen
Making
SRF LA. An ode to California surf culture, an ode to summer. Because we believe in an endless summer. And because Heidi Merrick is one of my absolute favourite designers and the most stylish one.
Exploring
Artist Heather Chontos will present works spanning the last five years in a new exhibition, “Trove”, in The Hague, opening on May 10th.
Heather Chontos’ art is not planned or calculated in any way. It is what comes naturally to her. She trusts her inner voice. She changes materials and scales, but the medium she chooses, linen, paper, wood, is always in close relation to the natural world – her art exists within it. And I believe this is one of the purest forms of beauty. And to be able to create art like that denotes not only a sense of respect, and even humility, for our world, but the deepest interior artistic enrichment. Heather Chontos makes art. She couldn’t be but the artist she is, fully aware that to exist here, now, means to be who she truly is. She has been herself from the first and the transformations that have taken place in her art have come from within. And I believe this is the highest form of art. She has found the liberty of being an artist, and to pursue whatever it is that there is to be found, her surroundings her open-air studio. When a shift of light, a look, a rare moment occurs, she will be present. Her curiosity always new, her passion not just for art, but for the possibility of giving an artistic language to emotion and life itself. Of her earliest drawing memories, as shared in our interview, Heather said: “My mother had a subscription to many different fashion magazines, Vogue, Elle, but most importantly at the time was Harper’s Bazaar. Thus was the time of photographer Peter Lindbergh who I worshiped. My walls were plastered with images from these magazines and I would add drawings and paintings to them. I loved Nadja Auermann’s face and would add to her images quite often. I was probably 10 or 11 at the time.”
Staying on the subject of fashion, Pamela Hanson, another legendary photographer of the 1990s, famous for capturing an ultrafeminine and adventurous spirit, has a new book coming out this September, simply titled Pamela Hanson: The 90s, featuring the photographer’s muses and top supermodels of the era, including Kristen McMenamy, Kate Moss, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Carla Bruni, Stephanie Seymour, Eva Herzigová, Milla Jovovich, Linda Evangelista. To say I am excited about this time capsule of my favourite decade of fashion photography would be an understatement.
The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Ruthie’s Table 4 with Ruth Rogers. Fashion Neurosis, with Bella Freud. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.
