- Two fiction films interrupt his career as a documentary filmmaker. In 1937, Dekeukeleire directed a peasant drama scripted by Herman Teirlinck entitled 'Het Kwade Oog/Le Mauvais Oei'l based on his play "De vertraagde film "(1922), in the vicinity of Oudenaarde (Flemish Ardennes) with non-professional actors. The second, The Hunt for the Cloud, a failed science fiction film, led him into a dead end. In order to get out of it, the filmmaker called on two journalists (Antoine Allard and Armand Bachelier) to write additional scenes full of self-mockery with Paul Frankeur (who, two years earlier, had played in the only feature film of fiction by Henry Storck). This did not save the film (renamed An Atomic Cloud) which had no career. This failure tarnished the morale of the filmmaker who complained of lack of financial means.
- For his first film, Combat de Boxe, produced in 1927, Dekeukeleire staged a boxing match in his room based on a poem by Paul Werrie. Dekeukeleire recruited two professional boxers, one of which was the Belgian lightweight boxing champion. The abrupt changes of scale, the use of overprinting, and the use of very short shots alternating between the spectators and the fighters made this film unusually complex for the Twenties.
- In 1929, he filmed Histoire de détective, a surrealist inspiration.
- As an informed film buff, he also drew his inspiration from visual artists such as Man Ray, Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp.
- Alongside the production of films, he practiced also the profession of film critic.
- Born of Flemish parents, Dekeukeleire developed a passion for cinema very early on and his masters/examples were Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, Louis Delluc, but also Dziga Vertov and Sergueï Eisenstein.
- His first three avant-garde silent films made his name in cinematography. His work then oscillated between documentaries and commissioned works.
- In 1950, Dekeukeleire had personal studios built in Waterloo with sets, recording laboratories, set construction workshops and even artists' dressing rooms. But the experience is cut short. Facing difficulties, the filmmaker turned to television (the RTB (French) and especially the BRT (Flemish). He directs TV movies and TV shows.
- He is the author of two books: The Social Emotion and The Film and Thought, Extra Light, Brussels, 1947.
- He was inspired by French avant-garde cinema, particularly the works of Germaine Dulac.
- He was a Belgian film director.
- Witte vlam (1930), dedicated to the pilgrimage to the Yser Tower, closes the experimental period of Dekeukeleire.
- Charles Dekeukeleire has made no less than a hundred films in a career spanning four decades, most of them commissioned. They are detailed in An encyclopedia of Belgian cinemas (Guy Jungblut, Patrick Leboutte, Dominique Païni), Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris - Éditions Yellow Now, 1990.
- Dekeukeleire published articles in reviews such as 7 Arts, Nouvelle Team, and Het Laatste Nieuws.
- His work deals with race at times, for example in Terres brûlées (Burned Grounds, 1934), which chronicles an automobile journey through the Belgian Congo.
- From late 1947 to late 1950, Jean Harlez was Charles Dekeukeleire's assistant.
- He pioneered modern Belgian film with Henri Storck.
- Created for publicity purposes, the documentaries he realized in thirties remain remarkable ethnographic testimonies. For example, in 1936, like Antoine Castille or, later, Henri Storck, Charles Dekeukeleire made a documentary devoted to Belgian folklore: Processions et carnavals / Processies en karnavals (this fifteen-minute film exists in two versions: one with the voiceover in French, the other with the voiceover in Dutch).
- In 1928 followed his masterpiece, Impatience, which is close to futurism. When it premiered, Charles Dekeukeleire stated that the gaze of the spectators must adapt, to let itself slip along with the film to feel the fragments of various lengths. The desire for physical contact with the machine is at the base of this film. In this drama with four characters (the Mountain, the abstract Motorbike, the Woman and the Blocks), the mechanical body, that of the Motorbike is strongly associated with the female body, first clothed and then naked with leather. Dekeukeleire exchanges parts between the two characters, resulting in a suggestive motorbike-woman/woman-motorbike. These two characters, the Motorbike and the Woman, then enter into interaction with the abstracted Mountain and Blocks, as if the director intended analogies between humanity, the animal world, the vegetable world and the mechanical world.
- From 1932 to 1933, the Société Gaumont and Germaine Dulac, who ran France-Actualités, made him their Belgian correspondent.
- In his book La kermesse héroïque du cinema belge published in 1999, Frédéric Sojcher quotes a letter dated March 27, 1941 and signed by Antoon Van Dyck, director of the National Institute of Radiotechnics and Cinematography (Inraci), a body which then used for Nazi propaganda. Van Dyck affirms there to have ensured "the collaboration of Charles Dekeukeleire and Henri Storck, as well as other competent personalities, in order to create in our environment a community of work for the Flemish cultural film". Recent research however has shown that Van Dyck had cited these two great names in Belgian cinema in the hope of promoting himself to the German occupier, without consulting them beforehand.
- On November 26, 1962, at the age of 57, Charles Dekeukeleire suffered a stroke which partially paralyzed him. He then retired to the countryside to his property in Werchter, Flanders.
- The first Grand Prix for Documentary was awarded to him at the Venice Festival for Themes of Inspiration (screenplay by Roger Avermaete), which made an impression because the author innovated in a still little explored genre, that of the art film.
- He spent six months on editing his eight-minute silent film from 1927 (Combat de boxe/Boksmatch).
- Charles Dekeukeleire married in 1937.
- His latest impulses are stimulated by television. This is Emily Dickinson (1962), a program devoted to the life and work of the American poetess, and which is a landmark in the annals of the small screen.
- The Founder, a scholarly mosaic of real images and filmed documents dedicated to the reign of Leopold I, was classified out of competition at the 1947 World Film Festival.
- Charles Dekeukeleire continued to make documentary films under the Occupation, like many Belgian filmmakers during this troubled period.
- In 1934 he made the documentary Burnt Earth. It was "the first Belgian profound documentary about the black continent" . The film is awarded the prize of the Belgian government in 1935.
- When he dies, he leaves the image of a passionate and lucid researcher, who knew how to put an immense talent at the service of small and large causes. With a lot, a lot of intelligence.
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