If Nicolas Pagnol, an intelligent businessman, is also touched to have been ousted from the Château de la Buzine by Benoît Payan, mayor of Marseille, it is because he was “very proud to bring this place to life that my grand- father experienced teenager. He couldn’t do what he wanted with it because of the turbulence of history, but I felt like I was succeeding. This castle does not belong to me but culturally, I am linked to it, he explains. When Marcel went up with his family to spend the summer at the Bastide Neuve, he saw his mother Augustine humiliated by the guard who refused to let them pass. »
In 1941, having become rich thanks to the theatre, Marcel Pagnol was the Luc Besson of the time. Author, director, producer, distributor, this entrepreneur bought the castle to make it a city of cinema, his Hollywood of Provence. Joseph Goebbels asks him to direct the 7th art in France. Pagnol refuses to collaborate, destroys his last reels with an ax. He leaves La Buzine requisitioned by the Nazis. At the Liberation, the French army in turn requisitioned the castle. His property was returned to him in ruins in the 1950s. He complained about it in a letter sent to General de Gaulle. Marcel Pagnol will never make movies again.
He wrote Le Château de ma mère in 1957, sold his empire to Gaumont and sold the château in 1973 to Kauffmann.
After the first two years in the red due, among other things, to over-specific programming, the current director Valérie Fédèle was recruited in 2011 for her skills in managing cultural venues. Nicolas Pagnol joined it by taking the presidency six years ago. On the board of directors, they surround themselves with respected personalities: Michel Cornille at the head of Eden, the oldest cinema in the world in La Ciotat, Éric Michel, director of the Cité de la Musique in Marseille, Laurence Guglielmo, director of the Marseille Book Fair, the architect André Stern, Dominique Bluzet, theater director, Daniel Armogathe, president of the Cinémathèque…
The frequency jumps from 11,000 to 75,000 visitors between 2012 and 2022. The number of employees increases from 6 to 24. The management is sound and the accounts have been balanced for ten years. In addition to all the work around Marcel Pagnol (previews of restored films, permanent exhibition, theatre, passage of Pagnol hikes through the castle), the place with its cinema attracts regulars with its varied programming and in original version, which is rare in the region.
Upstairs, the summer exhibitions on Steven Spielberg, Yves Montand, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Johnny Hallyday attract the national media and seduce tourists. This is one of the places where we bring American or Swedish friends to introduce them to Pagnol and the heritage of Provence before going to meditate on his grave a little higher up in the hills.
