René Viénet bought the rights to KuangChi Tu’s martial-arts movie “Crush” so as to repurpose it. Viénet’s creative use of subtitling in a first version and of dubbed French dialogues in the second version, is related with the method of “détournement“ of the “Situationist International”. Détournement can mean rerouting, hijacking, repurposing. The dialogues are in the Maoist revolutionary idiom of class struggle of the time and convert the original story, set in Korea, of Kung Fu fighters struggling against Japanese colonialists, to a contemporary story, respectively, of Dialecticians Proletarians fighting against the Bureaucrats. Viénet, who then fought against groupuscules of Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Guevarists, etc., for this first hijacked film in the history of cinema, said it is “a toast to the exploited for the extermination of the exploiters. An epitaph for a few friends. Let it be said, all films can be hijacked."
René Viénet
René Viénet (1944, France), a sinologist, situationist, writer, filmmaker and Maoist critic, is famous for the film “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?” (1973), made with the situationist technique of “détournement”. Viénet was also the series editor of “Bibliothèque asiatique” with more than fifty works published by a variety of houses. Against the Catholic Maoists, then in control of Asian Studies in France, he published controversial books and made the innovative documentary “Peking Duck Soup” (1977). Besides his business achievements in the medical field of contraception, he founded “Editions René Viénet" in 2003. From 2015, he collaborates with “Cinémathèque Française” on the restoration of his films and in showcasing films from China.
