There is a particular quality of September light on the Croisette — softer than August, less contested, the sea a deeper shade of blue. The summer crowds have thinned, and the city recovers something of its year-round self: quieter cafés, unhurried mornings, an appetite for things other than spectacle. It is, in other words, an ideal moment to step inside and think.
On Saturday, 26 September 2026 at 15h00, the Médiathèque Noailles — tucked at 1 avenue Jean de Noailles, a short walk from the old port — will screen Le musée imaginaire d'André Malraux, a documentary made in 1973. The film is a 90-minute interview conducted by Jean-Marie Drot, in which Malraux speaks at length about the genesis of his celebrated concept: the musée imaginaire, an imaginary museum assembled from photographs of sculptural works gathered from civilisations across the world. No building required, no geography to constrain it. A museum held entirely in the mind. Admission is free, though reservation is advised.
The Man and the Idea
André Malraux — novelist, Resistance figure, art theorist, and France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs under de Gaulle — spent much of his intellectual life wrestling with a single question: what does art do for us? His answer, developed across decades of writing and refined in conversations like the one captured here, was both grand and precise. Art, he argued, is humanity's response to mortality — what he called an anti-destin, a counter-fate. Faced with the knowledge of death, human beings have always reached for permanence through form: a carved figure, a painted surface, a sculpted face that outlasts the hand that made it.
The musée imaginaire, first articulated in his 1947 work La Psychologie de l'Art and later expanded in Les Voix du silence, was the logical extension of this belief. If art across all cultures shares this fundamental impulse, then a photograph of a Khmer relief and a photograph of a Romanesque capital can be placed side by side and made to speak to each other — regardless of the thousands of miles and centuries between them. Reproduction, Malraux understood early, had changed what it meant to see.
'The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.' — André Malraux
By 1973, when Jean-Marie Drot sat down with him for this film, Malraux was in his early seventies, three years away from his death. The interview catches him at a moment of retrospection — willing to trace the long arc of an idea that had preoccupied him for most of his adult life. Drot was a skilled interlocutor, a filmmaker and cultural journalist who understood how to let a thinker speak without interruption becoming absence. The result is a document of unusual intimacy for its era.
What the Screening Offers
The Médiathèque Noailles is not a cinema in the conventional sense, but its role in Cannes's cultural life is a serious one — a public institution committed to access, to making culture available beyond the festival circuit for which the city is internationally known. Screening a film like this one, in this setting, on a Saturday afternoon in late September, is a considered act of programming.
For those unfamiliar with Malraux, the documentary works as an introduction that no biography quite replicates: here is the voice, the cadence, the particular way a mind moves when it has spent decades with a single obsession. For those who know the work, it is something closer to a reunion — a chance to hear the ideas in their author's own words, in the era when they were still being actively shaped.
The screening lasts approximately 90 minutes. Cannes in late September remains warm enough to sit outside afterwards — there are terraces along the rue Meynadier and around the Marché Forville that would not object to a long, slow coffee and whatever thoughts the film leaves behind. The Médiathèque itself is free to enter, and the surrounding neighbourhood, away from the Palais and the Croisette hotels, has the texture of a city that actually lives here.
Some afternoons are worth clearing the diary for. This is one of them.