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On the Film:

Amit Dutta’s ability to create through his medium a world that one cannot – ‘dares not’, are perhaps the right words – enter on one’s own, shines through this work of his yet again. Taking a leap across time, he lands us in the midst not of a different space alone but of a different mind: creative, curious, daring, suffused with ideas. When his Unknown Craftsman dips into himself and connects with a higher reality, he is entirely on his own. But when he makes up his mind to create in this magnificent landscape something soaring, throbbing with thought, nothing can stop him. He takes nature on: now challenging her, now bending before her. Energy from an unknown force seems to come from somewhere on high, and flows through him. With the simplest, the most primitive of tools – a hammer, a chisel, a measuring rod – he sets about his task and ends up raising great, mystifying monuments that we call by the name of Masrur today.

There is magic here in this film; one feels elevated and challenged at the same time.

– Prof. B.N.Goswamy, Eminent Art-historian

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The film is set in the splendid landscape of the Dhauladhar Hills and the Kangra Valley of Himachal. The setting is not only for the natural beauty, it has a symbolic significance, because the film takes us on a journey from the Mountain to the Temple – a “Transformation of Nature in Art” in the words of Coomaraswamy. We become witness to this process of transformation. The Temple is not only a replica of the Mountain, it is a mesocosm between the macrocosm and the microcosm of the human body. The film brings out beautifully the entire symbolism of bimba-pratibimba: the Mountain is the cosmic archetype of which the temple is a replica. In its turn, the form of the temple is mirrored in the pond, so that the question arises, what is here the image and what the reflection. Such closeness to the tradition while carrying it over to modernity has a timeless quality. T

– Dr. Bettina Sharada Bäumer, Eminent Scholar and Art Historian

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Himachal becomes a holographic piece of India and the world, its materials, tools, and this major monument a means to illustrate the holistic craft of ‘temple’ creation within and across the Indian subcontinent. It is a miraculous fabric – a textbook of line and circle, gnomon and chisel – as evocation of the growing bud of the world. I would praise the film for making its larger references pan-regional and multi-community, as were India’s guilds and architectural traditions over the subcontinent and many centuries. Yet these variations are subtle colors in one central figure herself, the soul’s searching for wholeness, no finer example of which exists than that of the Masrur temple itself… a ‘minimal’ film focused to maximum effect – dhrupad.

– Prof. Michael W. Meister, W. Norman Brown Professor, University of Pennsylvania

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Agyāt Shilpi, the film, goes beyond the conventional sense of the so-called ‘experimental’. Amit Dutta’s cinema is the cinema of enduring austerity, and not of ephemeral opulence.

– Amrit Gangar, Author, film theorist, curator and historian.

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Reclusive filmmaker Amit Dutta’s The Unknown Craftsman takes to a whole new level a concern that he has been developing in his cinema for several years now. This is a definition of artisanal cinema that may well not have precedent. He films mountains like no one has shot before him. His use of character and (non-)performance may well be equally without precedent, certainly in India.

– Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Eminent Film Critic

The Unknown Craftsman’s achievement is to recreate the imagination of past generations of old masters who have left behind a priceless legacy of material, conceptual and spiritual heritage. The film does so with the minimum of resources and a rare sensitivity of image and sound combinations that are fully cinematic. Folk and classical music and the sounds of nature and the chisel gradually lead us into the heart of the temple, the mountain, and one of humankind’s greatest searches: form and art.

– Prof. Suresh Chabria, Eminent Film Historian and scholar

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Amit’s The Unknown Craftsman is pure joy of sensuous reflectivity, which evokes a unique sense of self-awareness in the audience. It can also be seen as film where man and nature form a continuum of the thinking processes where both evoke thoughts in the other.

– Udayan Vajpeyi, Eminent Poet and Writer

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“The Unknown Craftsman is Amit Dutta’s new ‘time machine’. I imagine Dutta must find a parallel between the work of a film director and that of an architect – also because, as reflections of culture, cinema and architecture illuminate and give substance to the questions that define an era. By combining architecture and cinema, painting and music, traditional culture and modern techniques, the conceptual artist Amit Dutta has once again created a new ‘total work of art’.

– Marco Müller, Le affinità elettive: il cinema e le altre arti, Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio

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To attempt the simplest possible synopsis of Amit Dutta’s new film The Unknown Craftsman, let’s call it a rumination on first principles for spirit-attuned architecture…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…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.

– Jonathan Kiefer, MUBI Notebook

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Amit Dutta, one of India’s leading art film directors, has a special ability to give human spirituality and relationship to nature a completely distinct cinematic expression. Dutta deals with the ways in which the medium of film can express time, as well as how India’s art traditions can be reactivated.

– Copenhagen Architecture Festival, Der Danske Filminstitut

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an attempt to understand how the episteme (shastra) of temple architecture is put to the test by the techne (shilp kaushal) of the artisans from the Kangra Valley in the Himalayas.

– Harvard Graduate School of Design, Change Matters: Quality and Sustainability in Constructing (Our) Future curated by Jonathan Levine,, Ordem Des Arquitectos in Portugal, 16th Convention for Architecture

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The Unknown Craftsman, in its final result, seems to paraphrase Tagore’s intuition when, in one of his most famous texts, he stated that the purpose of Indian art was “to make the divine and the transcendental palpable”.

Through images of great plastic beauty and charged with poetic force, as if they were snapshots captured by the photographer Steve McCurry, through his use of light and colour, we witness in the final section of the film the moment when the craftsman, in the middle of his enterprise, decides to abandon his work. As in Balzac’s short story The Unknown Masterpiece, the artist decides to leave his work blurred in the eyes of observers once he has achieved artistic perfection.

– Marta Sánchez, Filmadrid, Caiman Cuadernos De Cine

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In a riot of sacred gestures, poses meticulously studied to blend in with the environment, AD sculpts shapes and shades while at the same time applying color schemes, combinations, dichotomies and illusory visual games…But the building of the temple has other connotations, first of all that linked to the idea of ​​art that the author himself tried to convey, in gradually different ways, throughout his career. In fact, it tends towards perfection, it is looking for something that escapes it, something anonymous, an ideal, a face, a first cause. The efforts made over a lifetime, pursuing this ideal, are the path of the man-artisan, they represent the effort of the artist (in this case the filmmaker) in fulfilling this tacit precept. A discourse therefore which, more than religious, finds a solution in metaphysics as a pure question. ‘The Unknown Craftsman’ then stands at the culmination of a philosophical intervention that transcends cinematographic and sensible reality, existing solely as research or rather absence.

– Lorenzo & Stefano Paci, Cinepaxy

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