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 close associate of Belmondo and the man who introduced Bruce Lee to France.
In the 80s, the logo of “René Chateau Vidéo” featuring the black panther adorned VHS cassettes of the successful films 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-driven and popular cinema.
After René Chateau’s death at the age of 84, streaming had long supplanted VHS but his passing revealed the collector’s spirit of this secretive businessman, from a humble background and immersed in cinema since adolescence, when he was an apprentice tiler.
Starting from Thursday, the Millon auction house will gradually start selling the thousands of film artifacts from the 1930s to the 1960s archived by René Chateau in the five floors of the private mansion he occupied in Paris.
“There wasn’t a single centimeter that wasn’t dedicated to cinema,” recalls Christophe Goeury, an expert on the sale who helped clear out the premises. “He said he had the largest collection in the world related to French cinema and he wasn’t exaggerating.”
– B-Movie –
The first items up for auction on Thursday testify to the great eclecticism of this film lover passionate about B-movies as well as Hollywood and French classics.
In the auction room, one can find anything from a visual featuring Bruce Lee, from the cinema halls that René Chateau had opened in Paris in the 70s, to the original posters of “Port of Shadows” with Jean Gabin, “Casablanca” with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, or “Lolita” by Stanley Kubrick.
The starting prices range from 30 euros 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 intuitively sensed that popular films, B-movies, would become part of pop culture and be considered true works, much like ‘Blaxpoitation’, popular in the 90s by Quentin Tarantino,” analyzes Christophe Goeury.
“Today’s film culture is yesterday’s entertainment cinema,” René Chateau used to say, who also re-released on VHS some 700 films from before the era of television and the New Wave.
In this first auction lot, however, there are very few items directly related to Jean-Paul Belmondo, with whom he was an inseparable right-hand man for almost twenty years before a sudden rupture in the mid-80s for reasons never disclosed.
In 2013, on France Culture, René Chateau remembered the “slap” he received after watching Belmondo in “Breathless” at the end of the 50s. “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 partner. “I don’t blame Jean-Paul for being narcissistic and megalomaniac, essential flaws to be a good actor,” he said.
Published on April 8 at 10:50, AFP.
