Amit Dutta

The village artist Jangarh Singh Shyam left home and became a well-known contemporary painter. He committed suicide in 2001. Through his art, places and stories, the filmmaker explores the traces he left on his path.Read More »

Quote:
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, exposed to weather and war. Sensual and rigorous, THE GAME OF SHIFTING MIRRORS reaffirms Dutta’s place as India’s most accomplished experimental filmmaker. (Michael Sicinski)Read More »

Synopsis
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.Read More »

Synopsis
Two travelers journey in search of a flying-craft that can deliver them from this world to other dimensions of existence, all the while voicing and recording their memories and thoughts.Read More »

Synopsis

A painter’s journey into the source of his inspiration in the landscape surrounding him and within him.

Notes:

Shot on super-16mm film, this is an abstract exploration of the creative process. Starting with ‘Nainsukh’, his 2010 film on the eponymous 17th century master-painter, Amit Dutta started making a series of films located in the Kangra Valley of the Lower Western Himalayas. This film approaches another shade of the same landscape through the modernist paintings of Paramjit Singh, whose mud home-studio in the hills sets the stage in the film.

The film’s musical score is notable for Amit Dutta’s collaboration with Rudra Veena maestro Bahauddin Dagar.Read More »

Synopsis
A tree is felled in the neighborhood and a worm finds its way to a new home.

MUBI’s Take:- A tree is felled in the neighborhood and a worm finds its way to a new home.Read More »

Amir Dutta’s latest film, Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Marcel Duchamp, Or How Not To Do Philosophy, is a 17-minute animation that adapts an essay of the same name by Steven B. Gerrard. The essay examines how Wittgenstein and Duchamp, both keen chess players, used the game to question language and perception. The film has a winking style of animation—by the director’s wife, Ayswarya S. Dutta—that involves the juxtaposition of cutout figures, objects and backgrounds. It’s a sprightly investigation into the nature of surface appearances and how we perceive meaning, packed with allusions to art, linguistics, philosophy and chess.Read More »

Nainsukh is a 2010 film directed by Amit Dutta based on the life and works of Nainsukh, an 18th-century Indian miniature painter.The film contains meticulous recreations of Nainsukh’s paintings through compositions set amidst the ruins and environs of Jasrota palace. where the artist was retained.

The film premiered at the 67th Venice film festival, where it was received by Film Comment as one of top 10 films shown. It’s North American premiere was at the San Francisco International Film Festival of 2011.Read More »

Synopsis
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.Read More »