Carte blanche Nicole Brenez

René Viénet and Hu Jie give us an example of individuals acting alone, with no financial or logistic means whatsoever, but who, through the sheer strength of their intelligence, have fought the same dictatorship, either in the immediacy of their present (with regard to René Viénet, born in 1944), or in the still valid gravitational force of their past (with regard to Hu Jie, born in 1958). 

To do so, they have used sharp images against misinformation, ideology, concealment, denial. Mao par lui-même (1977), based solely on archives, builds a scathing “self-portrait despite himself” of Mao, that the French television broadcast on the evening of the death of the Great Helmsman, without really understanding what it was doing, a show of strength that was historical in itself. Propaganda images of the Cultural Revolution (2014) offers a staggering documented essay on the creation and dissemination of some of the most effective and harmful emblems of the 20th century. In Quo Vadis? I (2020), René Viénet relates in an enlightening way, his journey as a writer, filmmaker, editor, that is as intense as it is minimalist, worthy of both the Jansenist portraits of Philippe of Champaigne and the critical culture of François Villon, Vico, Voltaire or other great ironists with a “V”.

Nicole Brenez