Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 30, 2026

Jose Giovanni Wrote French Crime Cinema After a Commuted Death Sentence

Giovanni was born Joseph Damiani, joined a Nazi-affiliated outfit in 1944, and had a death sentence for triple murder commuted to life before he became one of the defining writer-directors of French crime cinema. Max Borg reports from San Sebastian, where a full retrospective ran that he argues could not now be mounted in France, and works through why the criminal past is not separable from the writing. The piece was built in the room, including a conversation with a Cahiers du Cinema critic, rather than from the festival's own material.

Read the story By Max Borg · Crooked Marquee
Jose Giovanni Wrote French Crime Cinema After a Commuted Death Sentence
All issues

Design

Arts & Culture

Sound

Collecting

Document

Film

A Cooper Hewitt Table Credited to Elsie de Wolfe Turns Out to Be Jean-Michel Frank's
Two Artists Spend a Day With the V&A's Dismantled Cochin Ceiling
Warren Lehrer Drew a Book About Grief and Let the Type Carry It
A Japanese Sign Painter Rebuilt the Near Extinct Craft of Chipping Glass
Zhi Wei Paints So Thinly You Cannot Tell the Paint From the Cloth
Suleman Aqeel Khilji on Deciding When a Painting Has Been Looked at Enough
What a Funded Year in the Studio Actually Produced, Technique by Technique
Adda Farcus on Collecting Objects for a Show About Climate Grief
An Hour of Conversation and Music With the Composer Enno Poppe
Roy Hall on Fifty Years of Importing Turntables and Arguing With Distributors
A Toronto Pianist Rebuilds Her Own Material After Leaving a Tradition Behind
Two Hundred Pages on a Cylinder Brand That Refused to Break
A 1929 Parisian Toy Nanny Carriage and the Luxury House That Built It
Of the 606 LE Monaros Built in 1976, Twenty Six Burned in a Warehouse Fire
Fifty Cheat Codes Pulled Out of a FIFA 96 Cartridge, Correcting Decades of Wrong Ones
Recapping a Micromega CD-10 That Came Back Still Refusing Discs
How Long Royal Society Fellows Kept Trying to Turn Lead Into Gold
Lois Hideko Niiya Founded Salt Lake City's Japanese Church of Christ
Conserving Sig Arno's Oil Portrait of His Wife Kitty
The Two Thousand Micro Moths George Gibbs Gave Te Papa Before He Died
What UCLA's Film Students Actually Shot Between 1965 and 1970
An 1899 Dutch Cocoa Commercial in Which a Doctor Cures a Patient With the Product
Derek Smith on What Radiance's 4K Restoration of The Inugami Family Recovers
Mark Bakowski Built Two Different Hulks and Choreographed the Fight Between Them

Follow Signal

Findings across Design, Arts & Culture, Sound, Collecting, Document & Film, gathered each morning. Picked up wherever they were left.

Subscribe by RSS
Small Revisions crate in primary colors