Amit Dutta

This short-film was made by Amit Dutta to encapsulate some essential teachings of Kashmir Shaivism as taught by Bettina Sharada Baeumer. The film was shot at Indian Institute of Advanced Study (Shimla) in 2016.

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In Haren Das: 21 Studies of Life, Amit Dutta portrays the remarkable ability to infuse static images with vivid life, giving an immersive experience to Das’s printmaking, wood engravings, etching, and linocut, used to capture landscapes, seascapes, and flora and fauna indigenous to the Bengal region.

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A film on the art of the revered Indian painter Jamini Roy (1887-1972). Could we reach out to nature through his seemingly flat colours and establish the diversity in this uniformity? A Thousand Colours of Jamini Roy explores the intricate world of modern artist Jamini Roy’s natural pigments and colours that are each rendered unique unlike the shades of the digital world today.

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An homage to the influential practice and philosophy of artist Nasreen Mohamedi. The film incorporates Mohamedi’s personal notes and her unique singular vision, drawing upon the aesthetics of the bare line, and its metaphysical journey eliminating physical borders/barriers.

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Culled from over 5,000 photographs by Jyoti Bhatt (b. 1934) from the collection of Bengaluru’s Museum of Art and Photography, this short film pays respect to an artist whose body of work is a portrait of the Indian nation and offers a poetic visual and sonic journey across land and time.

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Mother, Who Will Weave Now? attempts to sample and mirror the grand tapestry of Indian textile tradition and history by interweaving snippets of Indian cloth on an editing table, using the poetic meters of classical Indian literature sewn together with the words and motifs of the weaver-saint Kabir.

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A nostalgic tale about childhood bazaars, scents and smells.

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Dutta’s new feature finds Hindi experimental writer Krishna Baldev Vaid (1927–2020)—who was born in what is now Pakistan and migrated to India during Partition—living with his daughter in a small apartment in New York. “At ninety-one, after a lifetime of his love affair with language, he feels at a loss for words. His mercurial intelligence scales his life’s journey, mostly in silence. He reads out his own work, anxious to access the ‘dance of language,’ for expressing which he had paid dearly. He takes brief walks into the city, the sounds are not those of his literature. He has visitors, enacting an avant-garde play. He watches, silent, his mind in a place deeper inside him, even as his senses are alert, looking outwards”

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How do the vicissitudes of contemporary notions of nationhood alter our relationship with cultural patrimony? It’s a question obliquely suggested by Amit Dutta’s latest film. As a camera explores the architecture of a museum, we hear a description of a painting we never see. Eventually, we leave the building behind and examine the remains of a temple, explored to weather and war. Sensual and rigourous, The Game of Shifting Mirrors reaffirms Dutta’s place as India’s most accomplished experimental filmmaker -- Michael Sicinski

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The project attempts to push the boundaries of cinema by juxtaposing it with ideas from philosophy, visual art, chess, mathematics, geometry, linguistics and psychology

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Jangarh Singh Shyam, a famous Indian artist born in an isolated tribal village, committed suicide in a Japanese museum in 2001. I found on an old MiniDV tape the images of a trip I had undertaken in 2008, when I had gone looking for him in his native region.

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The Kangra Valley of Himachal Pradesh has a living tradition of the age-old water distribution system regionally called 'kuhls'. The custodians of the kuhls, or water-channels are the 'kohlis'. This film follows contemporary kohlis and their struggles in keeping the system alive.

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A tribute to Jonas Mekas. A tree is cut down, a caterpillar climbs its own thread, and drops of moisture tremble on broad leaves.

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Guler, a small principality near Kangra, was an artistic and cultural wellspring since it's accidental inception in the 15th century. Many greats like painters Pandit Seu, his sons Manaku, Nainsukh, and the poet Brajraj were born here. Today the whole system of patronage under which lofty endeavours were possible even in financially austere conditions is gone. And tragically even the physical landscape is submerged under a dam. The film seeks out some traces of the submerged past, through the memories of those left behind, a condensation of a bygone civilization.

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An eighteenth-century notebook from the Western Himalayan Hills has recorded in it dreams as omens. Scenes from the waking memory of the artist seem to have enlivened dreams from a bygone era. Coming from the family ateliers of the master painter Nainsukh of Guler, this journal of dreams is interesting not only for its ethnographical documentation but also for the excellent artistic qualities of the illustrations, underlined delightfully with sound and rhythm by the director Amit Dutta.

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Towards the end of the eighth century, an architect journeys across the lower Himalayas in search of the perfect site for constructing a temple, not merely as a place of worship but as a monumental record crystallizing the collective accomplishment of a civilization.

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Two philosophers discuss their ideas. The next day one of them is getting married and invites the others.

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A boy plays with his balloon. Something unexpected happens.

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The film juxtaposes two journeys, one in search of the name of a Pahari painter lost in genealogical registers, and the other in search of a lake once called the eighth wonder of the world.

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The Ashokan rock-edict in a remote Himalayan village has the last fragment of a script only decipherable by few experts. Some miles away in Shimla, the art-historian V.C.Ohri, who uncovered the origins and techniques of Pahari paintings, warmly welcomes visitors. He is meeting them for the very first and last time.

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The critic Max Nelson asks Amit Dutta a series of ten questions. He replies in the form of a video essay.

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The film is based on and inspired from the tinted brush drawings, sketches and some finished yet minimalistic works of the 18th century master miniature painter Nainsukh. Even in some of his finished paintings, the artist did not hide his corrections and afore-thoughts, which he allowed to show through a mostly untouched stark page. This film attempts the same.

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A thespian rehearses a Sanskrit play from 2nd century CE. The footage is robbed of sound. The inter-titles try to tell the story.

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This film explores various aspects of litterateur and painter Ram Kumar's personality by structuring the film around his stories and paintings, traveling between fragments of his past, present, fiction and imagery. It strives of etch out the synthesis of word and image in Ram Kumar's creations, presenting it as a portrait of the artist himself. The text used in the film is from various short stories by Ram Kumar.

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When a gallery of paintings becomes emptied of its spectators, the curtains raise within the paintings.

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The 18th century Pahari miniatures illustrating the verses of 'Gita Govinda' by the poet Jayadeva, are also loving and intimate portraits of the verdant landscape of the Kangra Valley. Nature becomes a primary actor and the director focuses on the alchemy of the 'transformation of nature in art.'

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Led by mysterious sounds and footprints, a painter wanders within a surreal space of the forest, his own paintings and oneiric spaces.

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Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

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Professor B.N. Goswamy travels back along the path of some forty years’ research on the 18th century Indian master-painter Nainsukh. Field-Trip follows the scholar in the lower western Himalayas as he tracks down contemporary vestiges of Nainsukh’s lineage.

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Amit Dutta recorded several conversations with Prof. B.N. Goswamy, an important art historian of India, covering his entire body of work. Interspersed with his talks were also some silences. This film draws upon some of those moments of silence and weaves them into a web of ideas and images that fill the art-historian’s mindscape.

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Two travelers are in search of a flying-craft, which they believe could possibly take them to the ultimate escape from the cycle of births. On their way they record their memories, dreams and fears on a sound-recorder and in a notebook.

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