FADA Film screens LE BOEUF SUR LE TOIT (The bull on the roof)

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?”