Jef Cornelis

’Brussels, fragments of happiness’ is no ordinary documentary on the Belgian capital. The aim of its creators, Jef Cornelis and scenarists Rudi Laermans and Pieter ’T Jonck, was to understand why this city had turned into what it is: a transitory space, a city where many thousands of Flemish people arrive by train or by car to go to work every day, just to leave again in the evening. Why did Brussels change from a ’dazzling city’ into a ’forbidden’ one for so many Flemings and Walloons?

Using letters from famous visitors to Paris - Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Rainer Maria Rilke - the magical image of the city of lights is linked to that of a banal consumerism. A visual essay about the experience of observing and being observed in a Paris with many faces.

For the television film Highway N°1, Jef Cornelis once again worked with architecture critic Geert Bekaert, who provided the screenplay. The film, which paints a portrait of the highway between Antwerp and Mechelen – and specifically the stretch between Kontich and Walem – deals with spatial planning on either side of an important Belgian arterial road, the first state highway in Belgium.

This is a film on country life, on daily life in a village. Someone ’who knows the way and the language’ can feel at home somewhere or is at least familiar with the vicinity. This popular expression suggests the relations between people within the seclusion of their village. This programme presents a portrait of the quiet and yet filled life in our villages, which cannot be looked upon as an anachronism. Villages are the ’unconsciousness’ of our society.

What if the street was not seen as a mere thoroughfare, but as an expression of society itself?

Held in Kassel between June and October 1972, documenta 5 was organized by “master curator” Harald Szeeman, and remains one of the most important international exhibitions of the last few decades. Entitled Interrogation of Reality—Picture Worlds Today, it brought together works by Marcel Broodthaers, Christian Boltanski, Arnulf Rainer, Claes Oldenburg, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha, and could be considered the first instance of an “exhibition as spectacle.” Introducing the different sections (“Artists’ Museums,” “Individual Mythologies”) and protagonists, the film is both a report on the trends and pacesetters of the time, and an approach to the phenomenon of documenta, sidestepping and questioning the definitions of exhibition makers, as well as of artists, of an exhibition, and of contemporary art.

After a general view of the city Ghent, its horizon and roofs, we are confronted with views of streets and houses in one particular district that is threatened with demolition. A poster announces protest actions against the demolition of the Patershol district.

Held in Kassel between June and October 1968, documenta 4—the last to be directed by Arnold Bode—was plagued by controversy and debate: artistic, political, generational, and aesthetic conflicts, as well as tensions between European and American art were some of the issues that affected this edition, echoing the social and political upheavals that were taking place elsewhere at the same time. The film reflects this effervescence, giving voice to the artists, curators, and audience, but also offers a unique approach to an exhibition in progress. We watch Sol LeWitt constructing Three-Part Variations; Joseph Beuys installing Raumplastik; Martial Raysse talking about the role of the artist; Harald Szeemann defending the concept of the museum; and Edward Kienholz explaining his work from inside his Roxys installation, among many others.

At the start of his long career within the Belgian public broadcasting system, Jef Cornelis produced a total of three films about historic buildings: the Landcommanderij at Alden Biesen, a military castle in Bilzen; and the Abdij van het Park, a monastery in Heverlee; and the Kasteel de Merode, a bourgeois castle in Westerlo. The second film in the series, Abdij van het Park Heverlee, was first broadcast on 25 December 1964. The camera slides along walls and balustrades, carefully climbs upstairs and captures the Norbertine monks moving along in formations. The camera work, as it were, emphasizes the eternal truth of faith. Yet what starts as a true ode to this centuries-old heritage ends in an act of unmasking.