Jef Cornelis (1941-2018)

The Belgian documentary filmmaker Jef Cornelis has passed away. 

“What Jef Cornelis considers the most important principle behind his work is that it adds something worth seeing to what we look at. At the core of his effort lies a tumultuous relationship between visual art and television, a medium for which he directed films between 1964 and 1998. Cornelis’ oeuvre was made possible by television broadcasting, but the relationship has always been an ambivalent one. Although he made over a hundred films, including films on modern art, architecture and the Flemish landscape, Cornelis’ work is primarily a dissection of television itself, the very medium in which he worked.”

Argos1

• 1In 2016 Argos and Cinematek held a retrospective of his work.