Jef Cornelis: biography in progress
By Koen Brams
Table of contents
Early years
A career in broadcasting
Architecture and urbanism
Art 1
Literature
TV arts in the 1980s
Art 2
Container
Reception at home and abroad
Cities
Magritte and Co
End game
Early years
Jef Cornelis came into the world in Antwerp on 10 June 1941, the only child of Carolus Cornelis (19 November 1910 - 18 September 1971) and Josephina Dingemans (12 July 1911 - 28 June 1994). Born during the Second World War, he spent some of his early years with his paternal grandparents in the village of Geel and some with his mother’s parents, who ran the party centre Het Nederlands Koffiehuis on St-Jansplein in Antwerp. After the liberation of Antwerp, Jef continued to divide his time between the city and Geel, where his father had been appointed as an excise inspector and he attended the local primary school.
In about 1950, the Cornelis family moved to a large house in the town of Brasschaat. By now Jef’s father was forging a career as a customs inspector in the port of Antwerp; until then, his mother had continued to help her parents at the party centre on St-Jansplein. Jef was enrolled at the Sint-Michielscollege, a grammar school run by Norbertine monks. In his second year in the classics stream, one of his new classmates was Dirk Decleir. The two began a great friendship which would also be a personal voyage of cultural discovery. Jef and Dirk founded their school’s own ‘academy’, reading and writing poetry and organising theatrical performances, amongst them Escurial by Michel de Ghelderode. For that production, they visited the playwright personally at the James Ensor House in Ostend. Impassioned by film, literature and the theatre, the pair paid less and less attention to their studies and at the end of their fourth year they were asked to leave the Sint-Michielscollege. Jef transferred to the Pius X Institute in Antwerp, Dirk to the grammar school in Kapellen. But they remained in touch and, together with another friend, Harry Gruyaert, would go on to found the theatre group Men. Its productions included a stage version of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
But Jef’s performance at school continued to disappoint. After just a year at the Pius X, he turned his back on the classroom for good. Instead, he decided to try his chances at the newly founded Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam. Having passed the entrance examination, he left Belgium for two years in the Dutch capital. On 10 July 1961, Jef Cornelis graduated from the Academy’s Department of Screenwriting. [More...]
TOPA career in broadcasting
Jef first wrote to the Belgian public broadcasting company BRT, asking for a job, after his first year in Amsterdam. More applications would follow, particularly during his national service, which he spent in the Belgian army’s Information Service between March 1962 and April 1963. Relatives on his mother’s side also contacted Paul Vandenbussche, Director-General of the BRT, on his behalf. After the broadcaster had been in touch with the headmaster of the Sint-Michielscollege, on 24 April 1963 Vandenbussche wrote to confirm that Jef’s latest application had been accepted. Herman Verdin, Head of the Artistic and Educational Programmes Department, wanted him to gain experience with Mark Liebrecht, who at the time was adapting his opera Parking for television. Some time later Jef was asked by Verdin to direct a documentary about Alden Biesen Castle. After this first film, the commentary for which was written by Bart Mesotten, one of Jef’s former teachers at the Sint-Michielscollege, he went on to make two more films about historic buildings: Park Abbey in Heverlee and the Prince of Merode’s Castle in Westerlo. For the first of these, which received its première at the Sixth National Festival of Belgian Film in November 1964, Jef was awarded the Grand Prix for Documentaries. Herman Verdin left the BRT the following year, to take up a position in Faculty of Classical Languages at the Catholic University in Louvain. He was replaced as Head of the Artistic and Educational Programmes Department by Dries Waterschoot.
TOPArchitecture and urbanism
After his films on historic buildings, Jef began to work on a project entitled Mens en agglomeratie (“Man and Conurbation”). This was a documentary about architectural developments in Dubrovnik and Stockholm, produced jointly with architect Walter Bresseleers. Jef also requested assistance from architectural critic and historian Geert Bekaert, with whom he had come into contact after the screening of his film about Park Abbey. From this initial collaboration, Cornelis and Bekaert would go on to become an established team producing countless films about architecture and urbanism. Their first major project together was entitled Waarover men niet spreekt (“What Isn’t Talked About”) – a trilogy attacking individual living and the town planning practices of the day. In the same year, 1969, the pair made Hedendaagse kerkbouw op een keerpunt (“Contemporary Church Building at a Turning Point”), a live television programme based upon Bekaert’s publication In een of ander huis: kerkbouw op een keerpunt (“In Some House or Another: Church Building at a Turning Point”). Their collaboration would reach its most intensive level during the 1970s, with films like Bouwen in België (“Building in Belgium”, 1971), De straat (“The Street”, 1972, winner of the BRT’s in-house Bert Leysen Prize and the Golden Prague award at the tenth Prague International Television Festival), M’Zab, stedelijk wonen in de woestijn (“M’Zab, Urban Living in the Desert”, 1974), Een eeuw architectuur in België (“A Century of Architecture in Belgium”, 1976), Ge kent de weg en de taal (“You Know the Way and the Language”, 1976), Vlaanderen in vogelvlucht (“Flanders from the Air”, 1976), Vlaanderen 77 (“Flanders ‘77”, 1977) and Rijksweg N°1 (“National Highway no.1”, 1978). Their last joint project, in 1989, was Landschap van kerken (“Landscape of Churches”), based upon Bekaert’s book of the same title. [More...]
TOPArt 1
Another key person in Jef Cornelis’ life and work would be Georges Adé, better known under his pen name, Laurent Veydt. The two men met at the Dutch Days event, held at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels between 15 May and 10 June 1968. Together with Adé and Geert Bekaert, Jef produced many short films for television about current topics in art during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973 he and Adé made Kunst als kritiek (“Art as Criticism”), a series discussing the critical potential of art. There were also longer films about art events, such as Sonsbeek buiten de perken (1971) and Documenta V (1972).
Geert Bekaert, Georges Adé and Jef Cornelis were involved, too, in the establishment of A379089. This was an alternative artistic initiative named after the telephone number of the arts centre at Beeldhouwersstraat 46 in Antwerp. German freelance curator Kasper König was asked to be its co-ordinator, whilst art collector Isi Fiszman was its main financier. A number of important events were held at “A”, including the champagne breakfast organised during the live TV broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a “continuous environment in sound and light with singing from time to time” by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and an exhibition/performance by James Lee Byars. It is with this American artist that Jef Cornelis would make the memorable The World Question Centre in 1969, a live programme in which questions put by more or less famous people formed the basis for an attempt to “gain a picture of today’s society”. The following year came a very different assignment: together with John Bultinck, Jef would make a series of twelve programmes for the BRT to familiarise Flemish viewers with the new VAT system, which came into force in 1970. [More...]
TOPLiterature
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jef Cornelis made a number of films about literature. Work on the first began in 1978, although it did not reach the screen until 1980 – in part because Jef fell seriously ill during its production. Called Het gedroomde boek (“The Dreamed Book”) and neither a documentary nor pure fiction, it was based upon a scenario by Georges Adé and explored Vita Brevis, the collected works of Flemish writer Maurice Gilliams. Subsequent subjects included another Flemish author, Daniël Robberechts (1981) – with whom Jef had already been working for some time on a never-to-be-completed film project, Een nare plaats (“A Nasty Place”) – and the Dutch writers Oscar de Wit (1979), Jacq Vogelaar (1981) and Hans ten Berge (1982). During this period Jef and his wife, Kristien Kloeck, and daughter Eva moved to a house designed by Bob Van Reeth and, externally, by Charles Vandenhove in Sterstraat in Antwerp. [More...]
TOPTV arts in the 1980s
On 1 January 1982, Hilda Verboven was appointed as the head of the Art Affairs Department at the BRT. This was already Jef’s main source of work, but now an extremely busy period began. More than ever before, Jef and his fellow producers and directors were involved in arts programming policy. In 1983 a new current affairs programme was launched: Kunstzaken – the department’s title in Dutch. As well as making numerous items for this show, Jef would also provide its original title sequence, based upon a photograph of the artist Panamarenko. From 1983 the Arts Department also made a monthly live programme, IJsbreker, based upon a concept by Jef Cornelis. IJsbreker discussed a huge variety of cultural topics – from fashion and tattoos to literary journals, arts centres and cultural management – in what was then a novel way: contributors at different locations were linked by cameras and monitors. Twenty-two editions of the programme were aired in 1983 and 1984.
TOPArt 2
After the intensive IJsbreker period, which he interrupted only briefly to direct a film about the Liege architect Charles Vandenhove, Jef Cornelis returned to making programmes about the visual arts. His subjects included the Paris Biennale (1985), Sonsbeek ’86 (1986), the Ghent Art Days (1986) and the Münster Sculpture Projects (1987), as well as a broadcast about higher arts education in Flanders. All except the first of these films were made jointly with Chris Dercon, who had previously worked mainly with Jef’s colleague, Stefaan Decostere. In 1987 the pair conceived a plan for a film portrait of the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. They travelled together to Finlay’s home, Little Sparta, where they spent nearly a week with him. But things went wrong on the final day, when Dercon asked the artist about his supposed interest in the Third Reich. This prompted a barrage of letters from Finlay, to their superiors at the BRT as well as the filmmakers themselves, as a result of which the film Little Sparta, Et in Arcadia Ego never made it to the screen. [More...]
TOPContainer
It was inspired by a text delivered by Bart Verschaffel during a series of polemical readings, “Hard on the Tongue”, given at the Brussels Beursschouwburg theatre, that Jef Cornelis devised his final live television series in 1988. The title, Container, came from the mobile studio designed by architect Stéphane Beel from which the programmes were broadcast. Ten editions aired from April 1989, covering such topics as sentimentality, Art Deco, Ernest Claes, theatricality and intoxication. Two regular panellists, the philosophers Verschaffel and Lieven De Cauter, were joined by one guest in each of the first two programmes and then two in subsequent editions. Those who appeared most frequently were artist and theoretician Paul De Vylder, sociologist Rudi Laermans and art historian Paul Vandenbroeck. From the outset, however, the programme was heavily criticised. The Flemish press, in particular the weekly magazine HUMO and some of the popular newspapers, launched scathing attacks on the programme makers. After seven editions, Jef Cornelis, Bart Verschaffel and Lieven De Cauter organised a closed discussion day about the Container, but by then BRT management had already decided to cancel it after the three remaining scheduled broadcasts. [More...]
TOPReception at home and abroad
After Container, Jef made several items for the cultural magazine Verwant, which was compiled by producer Annie Declerck. For example, he introduced the video work of artist Lili Dujourie and provided a very well-received interview with visual artist Jan Vercruysse. He also made a film portrait of artist Jan Fabre, scripted by Bart Verschaffel and presented by Declerck.
By 1991, Jef Cornelis had been working in Belgian public-service television for nearly thirty years and had made more than a hundred films. But domestic attention for his work was confined almost entirely to damning attacks in the popular press. More considered opinions came only from a few sympathetic critics, such as Marc Holthof, and close professional associates like Adé, Bekaert and Verschaffel. Nevertheless, in 1991 Jef was invited to present his work in Saint-Etienne. The French town’s Centre for Culture and Communications, headed by Yves Aupetitallot, organised a series of screenings and published a catalogue containing Adé’s version of a conversation between himself, Jef, Geert Bekaert and Bart Verschaffel about their collaborations. That publication also featured a selection of stills from Jef’s films and synopses of more than a hundred of them. Encouraged by Aupetitallot, screenings were subsequently held elsewhere in France and in Germany and Poland.
In 1992 Jef was asked to join the Flemish Community’s Art Appraisal Commission. First as a member, and later as its chairman, he tried to steer the government’s art policy in general – and its acquisition policy in particular – in a new direction. He stepped down from the Commission in 2001, and for some years now has been a member of the Art Acquisition Committee at telecommunications company Belgacom.
TOPCities
Almost all of Jef Cornelis’ final television films were made jointly with Bart Verschaffel and other former Container colleagues – most notably Rudi Laermans, a professor in the Faculty of Sociology at the Catholic University in Louvain, and Paul Vandenbroeck, Curator of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In 1992, as part of a prestigious exhibition project entitled “América, Bride of the Sun” – an initiative by the Flemish Community – he and Paul Vandenbroeck produced several films about the relationship between European and South American culture. For these he visited several cities in the region, including Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, to make portraits of the local artistic scenes. And in 1993 he directed Voyage à Paris with Rudi Laermans, a film funded by Antwerp as that year’s European Capital of Culture – an event with none other than Bart Verschaffel as its curator. In 1995 came another collaboration with Laermans, this time also assisted by the architect Pieter T’Jonck. That project was Brussel, scherven van geluk (“Brussels, Shattered Dreams”), about the Belgian capital’s Molenbeek district.
TOPMagritte and Co
Bart Verschaffel first came up with an idea for a film about Henri De Braekeleer, James Ensor, René Magritte and Jan Vercruysse in 1992. To be entitled The Music Box and built around the Laurel and Hardy slapstick movie of the same name, it would air in 1994 and explore the “interior art of De Braekeleer, Ensor and Magritte, and artistry in the petty-bourgeois era”. The exhibition Call It Sleep, prepared by Jef Cornelis at the invitation of Chris Dercon – by now Director of the Witte de With Art Centre in Rotterdam – can be regarded as an elaboration, or even an appropriation, of the material used in The Music Box. At any rate, it also featured works by Ensor, Magritte and Vercruysse.
The Music Box incorporated brief fragments from "home movies" made by Magritte. And in two subsequent films he made with Verschaffel, Jef himself paid homage to Magritte as a movie maker. They were Les Vacances de Monsieur MAG (“Monsieur MAG’s Holiday”, 1995) and Een weekend met mijnheer Magritte (zaterdag & zondag) (“A Weekend with Mister Magritte (Saturday & Sunday)”, 1997). [More...]
TOPEnd game
Jef Cornelis’ last film for television was aired on 28 October 1997. The project De kleuren van de geest (“The Colours of the Spirit”) was inspired by Trance Dance, an exhibition put on by Paul Vandenbroeck at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and devoted to “trance and dance in Afro-European tradition”.
By now, there had been a thorough shake-up in Belgian public-service broadcasting. As a result of fierce battle for viewers with commercial TV station VTM, which the BRT seemed to have lost definitively, the Flemish government sent its entire management team into early retirement. Director-General Cas Goossens was succeeded by Bert de Graeve, as “Governor-Delegate”, and the organisation itself renamed VRT. Moreover, the Flemish Parliament approved a decree allowing it to dismiss other long-standing employees. Jef Cornelis was one of those “offered” redundancy, and so it was that in 1998 he left the Broadcasting Centre in Brussels for the last time.
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