René Viénet
But his footprint goes much beyond the few youthful years he spent in this organization, as he explained in a 2015 interview with Daoud Boughezala for Causeur and in an earlier two-hour-long radio conversation on France-Culture with Hélène Hazera.
/ Su RenShan: Painter, Rebel, and Madman, 1814–1849?, by Pierre Ryckmans (aka Simon Leys); various bilingual books; and catalogues for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Floriana and Gérard Lebovici's Champ Libre put out Simon Leys's Les habits neufs du Président Mao / The Chairman's New Clothes.
The relationship with Champ Libre ended when Guy Debord convinced Lebovici not to publish any more books by Leys (including Ombres Chinoises / Chinese Shadows, then at the page-proof stage).
The latter was a notorious collection of first-hand documents written by the Red Guards, edited by Chan HingHo, who supervised the translation into French by a team of young students; the book had an introduction by Viénet, who coined the slang title Révo.
Taken together, Viénet's publishing and cinematic activities in the late 1970s constitute a lonely but devastating campaign against the quasi-general and aggressive consensus of a French intelligentsia befuddled by Maoist pipedreams.
Confronted by the financial failure of Chinois in spite of its success at the 1977 Cannes Festival, and by the relentless hostility of French academics—the same ones who made sure that Leys/Ryckmans would never teach in France—Viénet elected in 1979 to move to Asia, where, over the next thirty years, he was involved in various business ventures In 1982, he brokered a twenty-year enriched-uranium contract for the Taiwan Power Company, meeting one-third of the need of its six reactors' fuel-rods.
[1] Since his youth—and in a way that certainly makes him the odd one out among fellow Situationists — Viénet has championed peaceful nuclear energy and disparaged the illusion of subsidized wind-power, which he believes is the best ally of polluting fossil-fuel-generated electricity.
He was the co-founder and manager of a company undertaking the low-cost production in Taiwan of a generic misoprostol, (trademarked by Viénet as GyMiso), which is the necessary complement to mifepristone for medicinal IoEP.
It was approved for use in France, then in the rest of Europe, where it created substantial cost savings for various public health systems because doctors in private practice could use it, not just hospitals, where the Cytotec brand had previously been used off-label.
More recently, Viénet has been looking for partners to launch no-cost emergency contraception, based on a 10-mg micro-dose of mifepristone, which is patent-free, side-effect-free, well known, proven to be the best alternative, and in fact very cheap to produce.
It remains to be seen whether Viénet can succeed against the fat cats of contraception, who sell a cheaply produced ersatz version of Mifepristone (ulipristal acetate, branded as EllaOne) at a hundred times the price in Vietnam.
He contributed a huge trove of historical documents, including many rare photographs, to the ChuanZheng XueTang Museum at MaWei in the Min River estuary, downstream from FuZhou, concerning Prosper Giquel (1835–1886).
He identified these in the Société de Géographie collections at France's Bibliothèque nationale, and supplemented them, with the help of Michael Gray, by means of the John Thomson glass negatives of China preserved at the Wellcome Library in London.
To support many related exhibitions, Viénet commissioned Chinese translations of John Thomson's books, ultimately published in Taiwan, Macao and China.
In 2008, the fourth number edited by Vienet was pulped immediately after printing by the journal's owner (a Mr. Lorot), who sought to obliterate all trace of an article by Francis Deron about the slaughters committed during the (anti)-Cultural (counter)-Revolution in China, and later by the Khmers Rouge in Cambodia.
This in turn has afforded him access to the original negatives and let him create fresh digital files (in several languages) to replace the versions found on the internet, which are abundant but very poor technically and often badly translated.
1974: Une petite culotte pour l'été (aka Les Filles de Kamaré), making use of a Japanese soft-porn film by Suzuki Noribumi, which Viénet hijacked via subtitles and to which he added a few hard-core inserts for a more pointed détournement.
