LE BOEUF SUR LE
TOIT (The bull on the roof) 2010, 80 mins. HDV. Director: Jyoti Mistry.
Date: Thursday
28 may 2015.
Time: 18:00
– 18:30.
Venue: FADA
Auditorium.
Film Information:
SYNOPSIS (1):
LE BOEUF SUR LE TOIT (THE BULL ON THE ROOF) is an
experimental feature that deals with disparate stories and narratives in
Johannesburg, Helsinki, Vienna , and New York . The cities form a constellation
of the director's personal relationship with each of these places and are not a
function of geo-political conditions.
A kaleidoscopic picture of urban spaces:
walking through cities, taking ferries, riding trains, having an escapist
picnic belies the viewers' sense of place, at times disorientating but
constantly keeping you guessing about where you are. Wherever we are, we are
different, but do the same.
As we move through these cities language is a
preoccupation: with voice-over in more than 4 languages the sense of geographic
disorientation is heightened but held seamlessly together by the familiarity of
actions: sex, doing laundry, drinking coffee, reading, writing and the
sanctuary of a bath. Using various visual strategies cinema verité,
surveillance, performance, and animation
LE BOEUF SUR LE TOIT amounts to a personal
impressionistic essay that associates rather than explains, that shows rather
than tells.
LE BOEUF SUR LE TOIT features appearances by William
Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Mandla Langa, Suketu Mehta, and Kjell Westö;
writings by Kjell Westö, Amulya Maladi, Walter Famler, Lesley Emanuel, Walter
Benjamin and Alvar Aalto; voices by Akin Omotoso, Tsepo Mamatu , Vanessa Cooke,
Robert Whitehead among others; and original music by Nishlyn Ramanna.
SYNOPSIS (2): Written for the National Arts Festival Grahamstown.
Another stylistically audacious work, The Bull on the
Roof sails across disparate narratives and international locations -
Johannesburg, Helsinki, Vienna and New York. The result is a kaleidoscopic
snapshot of urban spaces and sexual variations - walking through cities, taking
ferries, riding trains, going on a picnic and fornicating within and without,
but always informed by place - site specific, one might say. The geographic
disorientation is heightened by voice-overs in multiple languages but held
together by the similarity of the small details of peoples' lives, whatever
country they may be in. Cited IMDB accessed 17 May 2015.
PUBLIC SCREENINGS
TO DATE:
Durban
International Film Festival: 2010
Women of the Sun Film Festival,
JHB: 2010
TOP KINO, Vienna, 2010
Grahamstown National Arts Festival: 2011
Goethe on Main / Bioscope, Arts on Main
Johannesburg: 2012
Jeu de Paume, Paris: 2013
About the Director
Jyoti Mistry was
born in Durban and studied filmmaking and cinema studies at New York
University. Her short films include We
Remember Differently (05), Yoni and
I Mike What I Like (06). Her feature
films are The Bull on the Roof (10)
and Impunity (14). She is the
cofounder of Shadowy Meadows Productions and an Associate Professor at the
University of Witwatersrand’s School of Arts, Film and Television Department.
She is an artist that embraces a wide range of the media; she recently had an
exhibition at Michaelis Galleries (28/04/15 – 16/05/15), titled Exnos .
Jyoti Mistry is able to move seamlessly between
filmmaking and installation art practices. She has made critically acclaimed
narrative, documentary and experimental films. Mistry’s installation work draws
from cinematic traditions but is often recontextualized for galleries and
museums that are outside of the linear cinematic experience. Cited
Michaelis Galleries, accessed 17 May 2015.
For more information about the director, follow link;
IFEMA: The conditions for filmmaking as woman – Jyoti Mistry. Accessed 17 May
2015.
Different, daring, anti-mainstream -- the Durban International
Film Festival is the place to be if it's the latest in experimental movies you
want. Written by Tarryn Harbour for the Mail and Guardian.
Accessed 17 May 2015.
Different, daring, anti-mainstream—you
won’t find them in your local DVD store, but the Durban International Film
Festival is the place to be if it’s the latest in experimental movies you want.
And local yet cosmopolitan moviemaker Jyoti Mistry’s latest creation could be a
good place to start.
Titled Le Boeuf sur le Toit (The Bull on
the Roof), Mistry’s movie has its world premiere at the festival on July 26.
She says the term “experimental” offers the audience a context for how to
approach the work.
“Experimental films move against
conventional, prescribed storytelling and visual strategies—the conventions of
mainstream cinema,” she told the Mail & Guardian this week.
Her film focuses on life experiences in
four cities: Vienna, New York, Johannesburg and Helsinki. It was shot over
three years—“a slow piecing together of impressions”, says Mistry. “Because
they’re all cities I’ve lived and worked in, the movie is not from a tourist’s
perspective. It’s more of a psychological exploration of the cities.” And
contrary to loose assumptions about “experimental” movies, Mistry’s work does
have a structure—a “narrative arc”, she calls it. The film “connects the four
cities in an impressionistic way, through the idea of ordinariness. There is a
focus on the banal; on simple, everyday activities: having sex, doing laundry.
It explores the ways people live their lives.”
Mistry “has a unique style of
filmmaking”, festival director Peter Rorvik says, “and the Durban festival
wants always to support and introduce audiences to unusual, daring and
groundbreaking films. Her film moves between what seems at times documentary
filmmaking into a poetic visual-art presentation and then flows over into more
of a narrative format and then back again. It’s quite an experience.”
Mistry observes that “experimental films
are new in South Africa, although not in the rest of the world”. Instead of
actors, Le Boeuf sur le Toit features real-life, high-profile personalities in
the various cities. These include artist William Kentridge, photographer David
Goldblatt, writer Mandla Langa, New York-based author Suketu Mehta and Finnish
writer Kjell Westö.
Making use of archival footage and
animation, the film comprises 36 sequences, each showing a fleeting occurrence,
such as strangers on a train or walking through streets.
The structure is designed to keep the
audience disoriented “but there are a few clues as to which city you are in”,
Mistry says. Voice-overs in multiple languages heighten a sense of
displacement, but the familiarity of everyday actions links the cities
together.
“It’s a very playful work, not an earnest political critique,” Mistry says. “For example, to show xenophobia in Johannesburg I used a mermaid, who, of course, is totally out of place in the arid city.”
The film’s title comes from a musical
score by early 20th-century French composer Darius Milhaud, which was used for
a 1920s surrealist ballet of the same name. The music itself is not used in
Mistry’s film—“it just refers to a moment of surrealism”, she says.
Producer Florian Schattauer explains that
sections of the film can be extracted and displayed as installation pieces at
art galleries and so treated as visual-art pieces, transcending the ordinary
parameters of film. “In cinema we are so used to watching a film once and then
we know it all; with visual art you can go back to it.”
Mistry’s previous films include We
Remember Differently (2005), which explored race and identity in South Africa,
and I Mike What I Like (2006), based on the work of poet Kgafela oa Magogodi.
She has a PhD from New York University and is an associate professor of film at
Wits University, but says it’s “difficult” to both lecture and make movies.
Schattauer explains how they made it work
for Le Boeuf: “We used invitations to lecture at other universities as
opportunities to film in those cities. And when [Mistry] was on sabbatical last
year, we used her sabbatical funding to do post-production work on the movie.”
For her next film Mistry would like to do
something with a more straightforward narrative. “I’m curious,” she says
simply. “What would the film look like if I followed the rules more? Would it
have a broader appeal?”
