Close to Belmondo, promoter of Bruce Lee: René Chateaus cinema collection up for auction

A slice of “cinema memory” up for auction. Hundreds of posters, photos, and books are being sold on Thursday in Paris, collected by René Chateau, an iconoclastic producer who died in 2024, a former associate of Belmondo and the man who introduced Bruce Lee to France.

In the 1980s, the logo of “René Chateau Vidéo” featuring the black panther adorned VHS tapes of the successes of “Bebel” (“Fear Over the City,” “Cop or Hood”…) and the kung-fu master (“Game of Death,” “Enter the Dragon”…), broadcasting on a large scale a testosterone-fueled and popular cinema.

With the passing of René Chateau at the age of 84, streaming had long replaced VHS but his death revealed the collectible spirit of this secretive businessman, hailing from a modest background and falling into cinema during his adolescence when he was a tiling apprentice.

Starting Thursday, the auction house Millon will gradually put up for sale thousands of film relics from the 1930s to the 1960s, archived by René Chateau on the five floors of the private mansion he occupied in Paris.

“There wasn’t a centimeter that wasn’t dedicated to cinema,” recollects Christophe Goeury, an expert in the auction who helped clear the premises. “He claimed to have the world’s largest collection related to French cinema and he wasn’t exaggerating.”

– B Series –

The first items up for auction on Thursday testify to the great eclecticism of this film lover passionate about B movies as well as about Hollywood and French classics.

In the auction room, one can find visuals of Bruce Lee, coming from the movie theaters that René Chateau had opened in Paris in the 1970s, as well as the original posters of “Port of Shadows” with Jean Gabin, “Casablanca” with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, or Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita.”

Starting prices range from 30 euros and go up to 6,000 euros for a poster of “M” by Fritz Lang, intended for French distributors of the time and therefore free of any inscription.

“He was ahead of his time because he had the intuition that popular, B movies would become part of pop culture and be considered true works, somewhat like +Blaxploitation+,” popularized in the 1990s by Quentin Tarantino, analyzes Christophe Goeury.

“Today’s film culture is yesterday’s entertainment cinema,” René Chateau used to say, who also reissued about 700 films from the years before television and the French New Wave on VHS.

In this first batch up for auction, there are very few items directly linked to Jean-Paul Belmondo, his indispensable right-hand man for nearly twenty years before a sudden split in the mid-1980s for reasons never revealed.

In 2013, on France Culture, René Chateau recalled the “slap” he received after watching Belmondo in “Breathless” at the end of the 1950s. “He has a sense of spectacle, he is extraordinary,” he said.

The bitterness was more palpable in 1985 after Belmondo’s decision to part ways with his associate. “I don’t blame Jean-Paul for being narcissistic and egomaniacal, essential flaws to be a good actor,” he said.