Phoenix Rising Film Screenings: Jef Cornelis

• 
10 January 2015

2pm, Saturday 10 January 2015

Nigel McIsaac, Raymond Townsend, James T. Ritchie, The Singing Street, 1951. 18m; Courtesy of the Scottish Screen Archive.

A collection of children's street games filmed in the streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town accompanied by traditional children's songs. The film was made by teachers at Norton Park School,

Edinburgh, with the "Whistling" on the soundtrack by poet Norman MacCaig.

“Their progress is followed along an ideal
thoroughfare. In songs where ancient ritual, myth, the mountain and the rose, mingle with taxis, telephones and powder-puffs. Old rhymes rarely dying - something new always appearing. No-one asks "What does this mean?" The world's accepted, poetry's kept alive. Favourite topic, love and death. Not meant for education or entertainment but belonging to the art of play. Shot in six Easter days of boisterous weather, the cast, mostly girls, numbering sixty.” - Publicity leaflet

Jef Cornelis, The Street, 1972. 42m; Courtesy of Argos, Centre for Art and Media, Brussels.

There is not much more left of the street than – to use a term by Le Corbusier – a machine of movement, equipped to make traffic run smoothly. The street in its original and spontaneous form, as a breeding ground for new life, is restrained. The efficiency controlling the traffic grid does not merely affect the existing living area, but also the form and pattern of new living. Residential areas have turned into traffic zones, inhabitants are pushed back into their homes.

The function of the street, of the home and the working environment is marked off – there are no in-between spaces left, nothing but trajectories. In sound and image, Jef Cornelis evokes,after a scenario by Geert Bekaert, the deterioration of the street, once public, into a fragment of an unnatural, ruthless production system.

This film was made on the occasion and as an extension of the exhibition ‘De Straat. Vorm van samenleven’ (‘The Street. A Way of Living
Together’) at the van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (1972). As a result the exhibition was not
confined to the walls of the museum, it was also extended to the television network. Television, in its turn, was involved in an actual social
process.

This is a free event but seating is limited so early arrival is recommended.