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?”
Le Boeuf sur le Toit is showing at 8pm on July 26 at Nu Metro Suncoast Casino and again at 2pm on August 1 at Ster-Kinekor Musgrave Centre