Selected passages on Amit Dutta’s cinema:
The New Yorker — The Best Bio-Pics Ever Made:
“as much a matter of cinematic modernity as of classical echoes”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-best-bio-pics-ever-made
Los Angeles Review of Books — The Quiet Filmmaker: Modernism by Other Means and the Cinema of Amit Dutta
“The visual language of Dutta’s films offer a translation from the painter’s canvas to the celluloid frame.”
The Criterion Collection — One More Day with Amit Dutta
“One common thematic thread linking the works is an emphasis on storytelling over the story itself.”
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7768-one-more-day-with-amit-dutta
e-flux Film — The Films of Amit Dutta
“In these films form, content, and media are inextricable.”
https://www.e-flux.com/film/programs/452979/the-films-of-amit-dutta
BAMPFA (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive)
Amit Dutta’s Cinematic Museum
“Dutta’s process-oriented films attest to the ardor of art history.”
https://bampfa.org/program/amit-dutta-cinematic-museum
Centre Pompidou
Amit Dutta: Through the Looking Glass / De l’autre côté du miroir
“He builds up a universe for the spectator where research feeds the imaginary … and where knowledge enchants reality.”
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/program/calendar/event/cyX4x8j
MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Nainsukh and Drawn from Dreams
“Persistently reflecting on the cinematic form, he places more weight on the making of meanings than on the meanings conveyed.”
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/8106
JonathanRosenbaum.net
On Kramasha / To Be Continued: The Rapture
“the viewer’s imagination is constantly being solicited to add details to the onscreen images”
https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2025/05/on-kramasha/
Caimán Cuadernos de Cine
The Unknown Craftsman
“A mise-en-scène that combines the divine and the human, the spiritual and the earthly, dream and reality.”
https://www.caimanediciones.es/the-unknown-craftsman-critica/
MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Making Waves: A New Generation of Indian Independent Filmmakers
“Amit Dutta’s otherworldly experimental works … investigate the interaction between the moving image and other visual forms, including miniature painting and still photography.”
https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5496
Film Comment
Olaf’s World: Amit Dutta
“What makes them hard to describe is their free-form quality, balanced between the abstract and the actual.”
The New Yorker
Nainsukh
“Dutta pairs detailed landscapes and majestic architecture with extended macroscopic reconstructions of Nainsukh’s hairline brushwork.”
https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/nainsukh
Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art
Amit Dutta’s Cinematic Museum
“They are attempts to merge cinema aesthetics with traditional Indian artistic ideas.”
https://asia-archive.si.edu/amit-duttas-cinematic-museum/
Cinema Scope
Dreams of Light: The Cinema of Amit Dutta
“Dutta’s career, especially since Nainsukh, has had few models or precedents.”
https://cinema-scope.com/features/dreams-light-cinema-amit-dutta/
BOMB Magazine, New York
Amit Dutta
“Like paintings, these films have surface tension. Inches behind this surface lies a cavernous, echoing space.”
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2017/09/18/amit-dutta
MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Chitrashala
“At the Amar Mahal Palace in northern India, several exquisite works come into focus, before springing to life before our eyes.”
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/2825
MUBI Notebook
Wait, Look: Amit Dutta’s Cinematic Rhythm
“What Dutta effectively achieves in almost all his works … is a new grammar of gazing.”
https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/wait-look-amit-dutta-s-cinematic-rhythm
BPI / Cinéma du Réel
Cinéma du Réel 2015: Amit Dutta, De l’autre côté du miroir — curatorial introduction
“Dutta explore les dimensions expressives du cinéma comme machine à voyager dans l’espace et le temps.”
https://agenda.bpi.fr/evenement/cinema-du-reel
The Art Newspaper
Book Offering First Major Analysis of Amit Dutta’s Work Puts Indian Filmmaking in the Spotlight
“a new framework to understand film aesthetics to whose basic assumptions miniature painting poses a challenge”
Senses of Cinema
The 53rd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen — discussion of Kramasha and Kshya Tra Ghya
“testifies to his remarkable visual vocabulary and his deft mixture of poetic narration and dreamlike imagery”
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/festival-reports/oberhausen-short-film-2007/
MUBI Notebook
Amit Dutta: The Art of Creative Deliberation
“Another way to describe Dutta’s films is as documentaries on states of mind.”
https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/amit-dutta-the-art-of-creative-deliberation
Film Comment
Festivals: Rome
“an amazing synthesis of painting and cinema”
https://www.filmcomment.com/festival-rome-2013
The Hindu
Amit Dutta: The Reticent Revolutionary
“He thus succeeds in posing questions to both cinema and the art form he explores.”
Scroll
In Amit Dutta’s Bold and Beautiful Cinema, an Unforgettable Exploration of Indian Art Traditions
“His films are situated at the intersection of Indian art history, philosophy, literature and narrative traditions.”
MUBI Notebook
An Excerpt from Modernism by Other Means: The Films of Amit Dutta
“The flow of time is constantly broken and remade, while a tense ambiance marks the urban spaces.”
https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/an-excerpt-from-modernism-by-other-means-the-films-of-amit-dutta
KNMA, Museum of Art
An Auteur’s Palette: Amit Dutta
“The aural and visual narrative of Dutta weaves together a unique style of research.”
https://www.knma.in/an_auteurs_palette_amitdutta
Hyperallergic
Looking at a Painter Through the Lens of a Film
“The film’s sudden changes in scale echo the shifting, incompatible perspectives of the Guler painter’s folios.”
https://hyperallergic.com/looking-at-painter-nainsukh-through-the-lens-of-a-film
The Seventh Art / Trafic
In the Ship of Amit Dutta
“Dutta adheres to a fragmentary, destroyed, schematic and spectral past. Indirect emotion is, however, a strong emotion.”
https://theseventhart.info/2020/09/15/in-the-ship-of-amit-dutta/
MAMI Mumbai Film Festival
Animating the Archive: Short Films by Amit Dutta
“How are works of art affected by the space they are exhibited in, especially when these works are uprooted from their original context?”
https://mami.mumbaifilmfestival.com/detail/?UID=336160FD-EF96-406E-A2F3-ECBD18094BD9
NO NIIN
I’m Not Nainsukh, Nainsukh Isn’t Us: Artistic Process as a Cinematic Device
“Woven on vast art-historical research, this film takes its attention to historical details seriously and lightly at the same time.”
Outlook India
Meister Pieces
“Intensive research and documentation meet imaginative representation, alternating between fantasy and reality. It’s as though he is trying to distil cinema to its purest.”
https://magazine.outlookindia.com/story/meister-pieces/290072
Journal of Indian Cinema
Tape 39: Memory as Document, Memory as Map Maker
“Dutta is trying to create a cinema in which transforming states of mind produce a new relationship to the image/sound combination.”
https://filmcriticscircle.com/journal/film-essay/tape-39/
DOKU.ARTS
Nainsukh — programme essay
“developing its own visual language by interpreting as well as questioning Indian art history and one of its greatest artists”
https://doku-arts.de/en/2012/programme/Nainsukh
Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation
Amit Dutta, the Art Museum and the Art-historical Detour
“In 2010, Amit Dutta redefined Indian cinema’s relationship with its art history.”
https://ssaf.in/ssaf_programmes/2025-amit-dutta-the-art-museum-and-the-art-historical-detour/
Film Comment
2010 Jeonju International Film Festival — The Man’s Woman and Other Stories
“with such exquisite gemlike color and composition and feel for rhythm that their subject matter fades into the background”
https://www.filmcomment.com/2010-jeonju-international-film-festival
Upperstall
Aadmi Ki Aurat Aur Anya Kahaniyan
“What is left then is only their relation to the space, the frame, as if each frame were a painting.”
https://upperstall.com/features/aadmi-ki-aurat-aur-anya-kahaniyan-2009/
MUBI Notebook
The Ferroni’s Film Comment Decade Lists — includes Amit Dutta
“Best New Filmmakers of the Decade … Maren Ade, Lisandro Alonso, Goran Dević, Amit Dutta …”
https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-ferronis-film-comment-decade-lists
The Hindu
Life in Symphony — Nainsukh
“There are many scenes which have been not just inspired, as Fischer says, but are visual interpretations of his paintings.”
https://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/art/life-in-symphony/article2660016.ece
The Indian Express
Secrets of the Valley
“We can also see cinema not just as a medium of entertainment, but also as a medium of philosophical, aesthetic and even spiritual enquiry.”
https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/secrets-of-the-valley-2
Next Projection
MoMA Documentary Fortnight Review: The Seventh Walk
“Dutta sets his imaginative vision and perception against those of the camera eye … puts them all in dialogue with each other.”
The Indian Express
‘I Want to Use Cinema to Explore That Which Escapes You’
“Several of his films are, in fact, like paintings, each frame inviting your eye to linger and to create your own meaning.”
Emergere del Possibile
The Seventh Walk / Saatvin Sair
\*[Source page presently unavailable for a reliable extract.]\*
https://emergeredelpossibile.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-seventh-walk-saatvin-sair.html
Scroll
Amit Dutta: The Director Whose Films You Won’t Watch in a Movie Hall
“an idiosyncratic style of merging fact, fiction, myth combined with literary text and cinematic tropes unique to him”
https://scroll.in/reel/372/amit-dutta-the-director-whose-films-you-wont-watch-in-a-movie-hall
Cinéma du Réel Archives
2015 retrospective archive: Amit Dutta, De l’autre côté du miroir
“Amit Dutta, le cinéma est recherche.”
https://archives.cinemadureel.org/edition/2015/?section=60363
BAMPFA (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive)
The Seventh Walk
“Deftly blending sound, image, and text, this subtly hypnotic film meditates upon the figure of Singh commingled with surreal tableaux.”
https://bampfa.org/event/seventh-walk-0
BAMPFA (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive)
Three Shorts on Indian Painting
“these three shorts see Dutta experimenting with radically different approaches to the master and his descendants’ work”
https://bampfa.org/event/amit-dutta-three-shorts-indian-painting
Voice Thrower
Even Red Can Be Sad
“the film isn’t merely observational; it’s discursive, free-associative, at times elliptical; it talks”
https://voicethrower.wordpress.com/2017/10/31/even-red-can-be-sad/
Cinepaxy
The Unknown Craftsman
“The film culminates in a philosophical intervention that transcends cinematic and sensible reality, existing finally as pure inquiry, or rather absence.” (translated)
https://cinepaxy.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/the-unknown-craftsman/
Hindustan Times
NFAI to Host a Retrospective of Experimental Filmmaker Amit Dutta
“His visual and narrative style draws on a rich source of inspiration including literature, personal and shared mythology, philosophy, technology.”
Financial Express
Book Review: Invisible Webs: An Art Historical Inquiry into the Life and Death of Jangarh Singh Shyam
“Dutta, too, comes across as a gleaner of the remnants of Indian art, with Jangarh as his doppelganger, a double for his life and art.”
Movie Mahal
The Seventh Walk: Modulations of Light and Space
“The modulations of light and space … emerge as a visual pattern that transforms formalist experimental preoccupations into something waywardly poetic.”
The Week
Bringing Nainsukh of Guler Alive on Celluloid
“These images come alive in Nainsukh, filmmaker Amit Dutta’s 2010 celluloid homage to the extraordinary painter.”
https://www.theweek.in/leisure/society/2020/07/21/bringing-nainsukh-of-guler-alive-on-celluloid.html
The New Indian Express
Nainsukh: Multiple Frames, a Painting
“Dutta essentially does a retroactive blocking of the paintings, capturing the visual population from its origins.”
The Seventh Art
Modernism by Other Means: The Films of Amit Dutta
“Taken together, these films constitute a cinema of aesthetic introspection.”
https://theseventhart.info/2020/08/23/modernism-by-other-means-the-films-of-amit-dutta-2/
Movie Mahal
Modernism by Other Means: The Films of Amit Dutta
“the creative manipulations of time and space would become a defining theme in Dutta’s work, crafting a ritualistic and measured tone”
Kitaab
Book Review: Modernism by Other Means
“It is lamentable that contemporary experimental audiovisual practice in India has been sidelined by disproportional critical and scholarly focus on mainstream and ‘parallel’ cinema.”
Eternality Tan
Ramkhind
“the members of the tribe exist outside of time – that what was recorded by Dutta’s camera is not marked by temporality”
https://eternalitytan.com/2020/11/27/ramkhind-2001/
Asian Movie Pulse
Film Review: Nainsukh
“Nainsukh is more a biography of the painter’s works than it is about his life.”
https://asianmoviepulse.com/2020/07/film-review-nainsukh-2010-by-amit-dutta
Firstpost
Book excerpt: Modernism by Other Means
“They propose newer forms of cinematographic expression through their constant, ongoing dialogue with ancient Indian artistic thought.”
Mint Lounge
Amit Dutta Talks Wittgenstein, Chess, Animation and Art
“Then there’s the work itself: formally constructed, minimalist, allusive.”
Mint Lounge
How Amit Dutta Started Over with Nainsukh
“The bulk of Dutta’s filmography envisions a cinema that is in harmony with its ancestral arts.”
MUBI
The Inimitable Image: An Amit Dutta Retrospective
“His deeply meditative films have an ability to create an interplay between time and space.”
https://mubi.com/en/us/collections/amit-dutta
BAMPFA (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive)
Surface and Depth: Recent Short Films by Amit Dutta
“Amit Dutta is best known for his deep engagement with India’s art and artists from ancient times to the present day.”
https://bampfa.org/event/streaming-surface-and-depth-recent-short-films-amit-dutta
A Reel Trip
Form over the Subject in Amit Dutta’s Nainsukh
“he uses a unique filmic grammar to give ‘visual voice’ to works of art”
https://areeltrip.com/amit-duttas-nainsukh
Asian Movie Pulse
Film Review: The Museum of Imagination
“Dutta shows how profound an experience art can be, how it can provoke thought and connect to our own memory.” (translated)
https://asianmoviepulse.com/2021/01/film-review-the-museum-of-imagination-2012-by-amit-dutta
BAMPFA (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive)
Streaming: Recent Films of Amit Dutta
“Indian filmmaker and writer Amit Dutta has created his own distinctive cinema through deep explorations of India’s artistic, literary, and cultural traditions.”
https://bampfa.org/watch-from-home/recent-films-amit-dutta
photogénie
Returning to the Canvas: On Amit Dutta and Modernism by Other Means
“This stitching of temporal realities weaves throughout Dutta’s work.”
https://photogenie.be/returning-to-the-canvas-on-amit-dutta-and-modernism-by-other-means/
e-flux Film
Conversation with Iman Issa, Part I: Scenes from a Sketchbook
“Even in some of his finished paintings, the artist did not hide his corrections and aforethoughts … This film attempts to do the same.”
https://www.e-flux.com/video/453557/scenes-from-a-sketchbook
e-flux Film
Conversation with Iman Issa, Part II: Nainsukh
“The only remaining testimony … are the painter’s intimately observant portraits of his employer.”
https://www.e-flux.com/video/455227/nainsukh
e-flux Film
Conversation with Iman Issa, Part III: Chitrashala
“When a gallery of paintings becomes emptied of its spectators, the curtains rise within the paintings.”
https://www.e-flux.com/video/456191/chitrashala
e-flux Film
Conversation with Iman Issa, Part IV: The Unknown Craftsman
“A monumental record capable of crystallizing the collective accomplishment of a civilization.”
https://www.e-flux.com/video/457752/the-unknown-craftsman
e-flux Film
Conversation with Iman Issa, Part V: The Museum of Imagination
“This film draws upon some of those moments of silence and weaves them into a web of ideas and images.”
https://www.e-flux.com/video/458912/the-museum-of-imagination-a-portrait-in-absentia
e-flux Film
Conversation with Iman Issa, Part VI: Mother, Who Will Weave Now?
“Attempts to sample and mirror the grand tapestry of Indian textile tradition and history …”
https://www.e-flux.com/video/461208/mother-who-will-weave-now
The Seventh Art
Nainsukh, the Film: Still Lives, Moving Images
“this art-historically rigorous, formally playful screen biography brought the painter’s works to life”
https://theseventhart.info/2023/04/24/announcement-nainsukh-the-film/
Lalit Kala Akademi Journal
Weaving of Varied Artistic Strands of Nainsukh, the Film
“The book should be of interest … particularly to those who appreciate the interconnectedness of various art forms.”
https://www.lajournal.in/images/Book-Reviews/Nainsukh-Review.pdf
Panorama-cinéma
Berlinale + Woche der Kritik 2024: Mother, Who Will Weave Now?
“comment l’esthétique organise l’Histoire en même temps que l’Histoire organise l’esthétique”
https://www.panorama-cinema.com/V2/article.php?categorie=2&id=1165
Cinéma du Réel
Marie-Pierre Duhamel: In Memoriam and Gratitude — Amit Dutta; includes retrospective context
“In 2015, she organised a comprehensive retrospective of my work for the Cinéma du réel film festival at Centre Pompidou.”
https://www.cinemadureel.org/cahier/marie-pierre-duhamel-in-memoriam-and-gratitude/
Moneycontrol
Amit Dutta, the Little-known Most Famous Indian Auteur: ‘The Kind of Films I Make Should Be Sought Out, Not Thrust upon People’
“The exhaustive breadth of Amit Dutta’s films refuses easy summation.”
Moneycontrol
‘Kumar Gandharva Was Not Just a Musical Genius but Also a Profound Scholar and Thinker’: Amit Dutta and Kuldeep Barve
“Whether you see him as a singular artist or as an exponent of Prayoga aesthetics, his work continues to surprise, enchant and educate.”
In Review Online
Rhythm of a Flower — IFFR 2025 Review
“One art form is always nibbling at the boundaries of the other, intermingling and evolving by opening themselves to wider avenues.”
https://inreviewonline.com/2025/02/10/rhythm-of-a-flower/
desistfilm
Cinéma du Réel 2025: Stream-Story de Amit Dutta
“Este documental describe, desde una serie de recursos visuales … y con una claridad compositiva, las acciones de una comunidad en el valle de Kangra.”
https://desistfilm.com/cinema-du-reel-2025-stream-story-de-amit-dutta/
In Review Online
Eberhard as Seen by Amit — Cinéma du Réel 2026 Review
“Dutta lets both “high” and “low” forms converse on an equal footing while sketching the traces of history and aesthetics that link them together.”
https://inreviewonline.com/2026/03/30/eberhard-as-seen-by-amit-review/
Outlook India
Towards a Self-reliant Cinema
“His work goes far beyond these terms as he expands the possibilities of cinematography.”
Outlook India
Rhythm of a Flower: Amit Dutta Merges a Singer’s Breath with Cinematic Cadence
“this is more than just a production model; it is a profound philosophical and aesthetic approach aimed at liberating the medium of cinema”
Art House Cinema
Amit Dutta
“Dutta’s formation was thus as much that of a scholar and ethnographer as of a filmmaker.”
https://www.arthousecinema.in/people/amit-dutta/
Cinéma du Réel
Amit Dutta
“His works range from literary adaptations, fiction, documentation, video-diary and animation, often blurring genres in an attempt to engage directly with the subjects.”
https://archives.cinemadureel.org/en/biographie/amit-dutta-6
LetsOTT
The Day a Tree Fell
“A puzzling work of naturalism.”
“With Dutta, an artwork isn’t something to be seen, but a material to enter (it’s the same with sounds: we don’t hear them as much as we enter them)… In Dutta’s films, there is a materiality surrounding the works whose texture can be temporarily modified in order to approach and enter them.”
– Pascale Bodet, In the Ship Of Amit Dutta, Traffic 95, The Seventh Art
“Meandering at a restful pace through the vastness of artistic forms and expressions, Amit Dutta’s roving eye cajoles the viewer to accompany him on his search for luminosity…The aural and visual narrative of Dutta weaves together a unique style of research. He documents themes of art historical relevance that may be niche in form but also extremely personal and exploratory in nature.
– An Auteur’s Palette, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, 2021
Whether in sensuous tracking shots past paintings on gallery walls or ancient sculptures in their original setting; animations of artworks that reveal their underlying effects; moments of improvised acting; or expeditions and visits with unanticipated results, Dutta’s evocative films find new and beautiful expression in dialogue with their subjects.
– Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), August, 2021
In Dutta’s cinema, memory is at the heart of the present, and history, far from receding, belongs to the visible world. A film can be another literary text, free from so-called adaptation (The Man’s Woman and Other Stories), representation and fiction are woven into reality (The Seventh Walk), memories can be seen. We’ll hear the musical rhythm of the editing in its “logic of dreams” where time and space fit into one another almost infinitely. Like Lewis Caroll’s Alice, the adventurers in Sonchidi and the painter in The Seventh Walk fallen asleep at the foot of a tree: crossing through to the other side is the movement by which cinema conjoins waking and dreaming, intuition and sensation, reflection and narrative, knowledge and imagination. For, as Dutta would say, cinema may well reveal what escapes us. And seeing his films brings to mind a key expression of Robert Beavers: “the philosophical majesty of the image”.
– Cinema Du Reel, Through the looking glass (Amit Dutta Retrospective), Marie-Pierre Duhamel Muller, 2015.
“In Dutta’s films, artworks are rarely frozen, static things but ceaselessly evolving entities, constantly being made and remade, having their boundaries redrawn, and being conflated, in the eye of the beholder, with the world they represent.”
— Cinema Scope 58, Max Nelson, 2014.
Experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta is a unique cinematic voice in Indian cinema. Continually engaging with art, history, architecture, mythology, folk tales, literature, music, nature, and even chess, Dutta’s intriguing works can best be understood as exploring all that exists at the confluence of these diverse concerns. An effortless extension of his film practice, his books also seem to have an impact on his films. Dutta’s frequent use of text in his films work alongside his exceptional use of sound design, visual geometries, and the close attention he pays to nature, creating fascinating images which generate new meanings with each viewing. His deeply meditative films have an ability to create an interplay between time and space, giving viewers a feeling of existing in the past, present and future at the same time.
– MUBI, The Inimitable Image: An Amit Dutta Retrospective, 2020.
What Dutta effectively achieves in almost all his works, ones that have gained him the reputation of being “the most famous Indian filmmaker you may have never heard of,” is a new grammar of gazing. Dutta’s cinema, interested as it is in looking rather than narrating or dramatizing, taps into this unique visual experience, an experience belonging both to him and to the characters he chooses to see the world through.
The exhaustive breadth of Amit Dutta’s films refuses easy summation. They traverse genres, moving effortlessly from crafted scenario to spontaneous encounter, from mindful self-reflexivity to ghostly magic. Art—literature, music, and particularly painting—permeates Dutta’s work. It appears as the subject of his films, yet it is also absorbed into their very material as cinematography and soundscape—as cinema. Sudden sweeping camera pans veer left only to turn right, and surprising sounds of alarm bells and ticking clocks startle us. Like paintings, these films have surface tension. Inches behind this surface lies a cavernous, echoing space where unhurried tracking shots and distant ambiences suggest a less immediate kind of time, one that is long past. Just as such temporal and spatial registers commingle and blur in Dutta’s films, so do art and nature, indeed, the man-made and the natural, until their distinctions fade and make way for the rich resonances that emerge from the gaps in between.
– BOMB Magazine, Shambhavi Kaul, 2017.
Coming across neither as superior to his subjects nor debilitatingly awed by them, Dutta maintains a scrupulous curiosity. His earlier work sits comfortably within the highest class of inventively literal art films—Greenaway’s Rembrandt projects, Jarman’s Caravaggio, Kurosawa’s Dreams, among so many others—but that extra something he brings to the table is the refreshment of decidedly non-European aesthetics. Helpfully, the syntax of Dutta’s movie language is direct and precise, privileging clarification to the point of incandescence. Camera moves often emphasize wonderment: We’re reminded to marvel, for instance, at how the parallax in a simple forward dolly draws attention to a chosen detail, or decisively reconfigures onscreen space. Editing schemes evoke, and evince, mental avidity, oscillating between studiousness and free association. (Another way to describe Dutta’s films is as documentaries on states of mind.) From film to film, Dutta revisits an ensemble of sounds—thunder claps, birdsong, close-range recordings of hand tools at work, pages being turned—and enriches them through rhythmic repositioning. This all has a way of leading us to the optimistic epiphany that postmodernism and folklore might at last discover, or rediscover, a common idiom.
And as the images seem to erupt from each other, so do the films. The Unknown Craftsman develops Dutta’s longstanding idea that inasmuch as the deepest questions have answers at all, one way toward those answers must be through a direct experience of the natural landscape. Or, as the narrator puts it, “The forms of nature arise in the hearts of those who are moved by the creative impulse.” Whether or not this tells us how to cultivate inspiration will be up to each viewer to decide. But certainly it affirms the value of Dutta’s ongoing project—to divine, by way of research, intuition, and experimentation, the purest universal source of creative expression.
– MUBI Notebook Feature, Jonathan Kiefer, 2017.
Whether he’s profiling an imaginary 8th-century architect, the 18th-century painter Nainsukh, or a contemporary artist, or simply exploring a museum, Amit Dutta engages deeply with India’s artistic traditions in his films. Far from straightforward documentaries, they function as dialogues between the past and present, and between the media of film and painting, using impressionistic narration, immersive sound design, and gorgeous visual compositions inspired by Indian aesthetic traditions.
The Smithsonian, Amit Dutta’s Cinematic Museum, Freer & Sackler, 2021.
Over the past few years, Dutta has become a kind of emissary from one medium to another, or (as he might prefer to see himself) a landscape painter who happens to work with a camera rather than a brush. With each new entry in his cinematic museum, he seems to be striving for the same goal as Balzac’s artist in “The Unknown Masterpiece”: an effacement of the distinction between reality and representation, a work in which “the air is so real you can no longer distinguish it from the air around yourselves.”
Cinemascope, Dreams of Light: The Cinema of Amit Dutta, Max Nelson, 2014.
Amit Dutta promotes the idea of an accessible cinema, unbound by the increasingly austere practices of industry filmmaking, where capital is centered abroad. He has publicly said: “Money and human relationships have always intervened in filmmaking, but digital technology is making them less necessary, giving more time and space for the inner journey.” This more personalized, low-budget approach severs the shackles of the artist to a capitalist enterprise that treats his work as a commodity instead of an intangible expression of artistic autonomy. Srinivasan notes how the last shot of Dutta’s 2017 film The Unknown Craftsman, is a perfect metaphor for the independent filmmaker as a journeyman working with a chisel and hammer.
Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The Quiet Filmmaker: Srikanth Srinivasan’s “Modernism by Other Means” and the Cinema of Amit Dutta, Soham Gadre, 2021
With lush imagery and dreamlike editing, Dutta evokes a sense of myth and history surrounding family and community; the film’s sense of “otherness” (from a Western point of view) is in some ways an answer to and repudiation of the kind of narratives produced by the mainstream Western film industry. Like the works of Paradjanov, which it reminded me of, it suggests a richer, less material view of life rooted in stories and traditions handed down through generations, connecting the present to the past in a vital, living way.
CageyFilms, An evening with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kenneth George Godwin,