René Viénet

Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires

René Viénet

Unlike his earlier films "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?" and "The Girls of Kamare", which "detourned" drama films, in this one, Viénet uses a great variety of sources (particularly archive footage of People's Republic of China leaders) to compose a political documentary sharply critical of Mao's legacy in China. The title is a reference to the pamphlet "Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains" featured in "Philosophy in the Bedroom" of Marquis de Sade.

Girls of Kamare

Noribumi Suzuki, René Viénet

A Situationist film by Rene Vienet that juxtaposes musings on film, censorship, and society with Japanese pinky film Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom.

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

René Viénet, Kuang-chi Tu

Chan Huang Liu, Jason Pai Piao

A Kong Kong martial arts movie redubbed by situationist René Viénet. The narrative focuses on a conflict between proletarians and bureaucrats within state capitalism. The proletarians enlist their grasp of dialectics in the fight against their oppressors, while the bureaucrats defend themselves using a combination of co-optation and violence.

Mao par Lui-même

Francis Deron, René Viénet

Mao Zedong

A film-détournement biography of Mao Tse-tung in which the life of the recently deceased Great Helmsman is told in his own words, using quotes culled from various Red Guard publications. The rise to power of the film's namesake appears as the inevitable outcome of a dialectical logical. Or so the voice-over might lead one to believe. If the usual practice of détourned films is for the soundtrack to undermine the image, here the reverse occasionally takes place. The images critique Mao's words. They show that which, even in the official visual record of the times, the narrative elides. The film is dedicated to Li Yhi Zhe, the nominal author of a famous Democracy Wall critique of the Maoist state.

Autoportrait

René Viénet