René Viénet (born 6 February 1944 in Le Havre) is a French sinologist who is famous as a situationist writer and filmmaker. Viénet used the situationist technique of détournement — the diversion of already existing cultural elements to new subversive purposes. Career René Viénet was a member of the Situationist International (SI) from 1963 to 1971. He was one of the SI’s two filmmakers, though his films were made and released after he had left the group. 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. These two interviews are his only public discussions of his life and work to date. Viénet has supplied most of the details, and approved the present premature epitaph, assuming it remains unaltered. René Viénet was born on 6 February 1944 to a family that had been dockworkers for several generations in Le Havre, France. He lived in Le Havre until he moved to Paris to study Chinese with Jacques Pimpaneau, an extraordinarily productive scholar, with whom he has remained close friends ever since. Viénet’s film Mao by Mao (1977) is dedicated to Jacques Pimpaneau. From October to March 1965, Viénet briefly taught French at NanJing University in China. Upon his return to France, he translated Harold Isaacs’s Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution into French for Éditions Gallimard. This book had a lasting influence on him; in 1974, in Hong Kong, using lead type, he reprinted an early and forgotten Chinese translation of it. From 1967 to 1978, Viénet was employed by the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Based at Paris University 7 (Jussieu), he established a library devoted to modern Chinese history and literature and set up the only archive of Chinese films outside China. All of these films, which he collected in Hong Kong with Chan HingHo and Françoise Zylberberg, were later transferred to the Taipei Film Library. Viénet was also the series editor of more than fifty works published by a variety of houses but collectively known as the Bibliothèque Asiatique. These included: La Vie et l’œuvre de Su Renshan, rebelle, peintre, et fou, 1814-1849? / 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.