DE LANGSTE DAG @ ERG

Dialogue with JEF CORNELIS & erg & LUCA School of Arts 'students Screening of DE LANGSTE DAG & conversation with Jef Cornelis.

Jef Cornelis (°1941) worked as executor, director and scriptwriter for the VRT, the Dutch-language Belgian public broadcasting corporation, from 1963 until 1998. Over those 35 years Cornelis accomplished an impressive body of work. It comprises over 200 titles and is generally considered as groundbreaking, artistically and cultural-historically. ‘De Langste Dag / The Longest Day’ is a unique film that consists of the lengthy live coverage of the opening event of the notorious exhibition ‘Chambres d’Amis’, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in private dwellings in the city centre of Ghent. The film is one of Cornelis’ most radical experiments with live television and with the format of the documentary. Exploiting the available logistics of the Tour de France (helicopters, mobile reporters and a television studio with guests), this film presented the television audience in 1986 with a revelatory, and at times kaleidoscopic view of such a cultural event as the opening of an extra-muros art exhibition.

De Langste Dag 1986, 375’48", colour, English, Dutch, Italian and French spoken, English subtitles