René Chateau, producer, distributor and publisher of the “Mémoire du cinéma” collection, has died

He was an associate of Belmondo, imposed Bruce Lee on French screens and circumvented censorship by releasing “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” on VHS: producer and editor René Chateau died at the age of 84.

A great film buff, publisher: the man who compiled a veritable collection of rare films and spent years working with film stars as an independent producer and distributor, died last week, the team at René Editions announced on Wednesday February 14 Château in a press release, without giving a precise date.

“It is with great emotion and sadness that we announce the death of René Chateau. Independent and proud of it, a passionate man for whom ‘today’s cinematic culture was the entertainment cinema of ‘yesterday’. He opened the doors of dreams and memories for us with his collection of exceptional films: The Memory of French Cinema. We will sorely miss him.” writes his team in the press release.

Belmondo and Bruce Lee

Video producer and editor, René Chateau has never been a man of the shadows. Married to the actress Brigitte Lahaie, he rubbed shoulders with the stars of an entire era. His path crossed that of Jean-Luc Godard, Brigitte Bardot, Serge Gainsbourg and Claude Lanzmann. Above all René Chateau is the friend of Jean-Paul Belmondo of whom he was also press officer, publicist and shareholder of his production company. The two men enjoyed fifteen years of success together, particularly with films Cops and robbers, The Ace of Aces Or The professional. While watching over Belmondo’s career, René Chateau launched that of another action film star. He is in fact the first person to broadcast the films of Chinese-American actor Bruce Lee in France. Predicting the success of kung-fu films, the producer also predicted that of horror films.

If five Ministers of Culture consecutively prevented him from broadcasting Chainsaw Massacre, René Château managed to circumvent censorship in 1980 by releasing the feature film on VHS. He thus created the collection Movies You’ll Never See on TV through which he brings films into households that the French were not used to seeing.

The memory of cinema

A lover of the 7th art, René Chateau spent his youth in the cinemas of Île-de-France, from the red armchairs of Pré-Saint-Gervais and Montreuil to the dark rooms of Montmartre and the Latin Quarter. The man who played a pioneering role through the distribution of works that stood out from the cinematographic landscape of the time spent part of his life collecting the films of yesterday. He thus founded the collection The Memory of Cinema which lists thousands of films dating from 1930 to 1980.

His name can be found on the covers of thousands of cassettes and DVDs. Since 1979, René Chateau had restored numerous films with the ambition of preserving this heritage and sharing these works which risked falling into oblivion.