The Phantasmagorical, Art-Historical and (Beyond) Ethnographic World of Amit Dutta
A book-length process-driven reading of Amit Dutta’s cinema, treating his films as an interconnected ecosystem of practices that move fluidly between ethnography, art history, ecology, myth, and avant-garde form. The author adopts a fragmentary, portal-like structure that mirrors Dutta’s own method: cinema as museum, field survey, archive, and thought experiment.
On the Book:
“Rahul Sharma’s book on Amit Dutta offers an insightful and theoretically rich exploration of one of contemporary India’s most significant experimental filmmakers. Through close readings of Dutta’s films, Sharma brings together cultural history and critical theory to illuminate the aesthetic and intellectual complexity of works deeply engaged with Indian art and cultural traditions. The result is an original example of transcultural film analysis that bridges South Asian visual traditions with global debates on experimental cinema and cultural modernity.”
— Prof. Andres Kurg, Head of the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts