Amit Dutta’s Cinematic Museum

September 3–10, 2017

Examining India’s contemporary artists and classical painters, Dutta’s process-oriented films attest to the ardor of art history.

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Scenes From a Sketchbook
The Unknown Craftsman
Even Red Can Be Sad
Nainsukh

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Past Films

The Unknown Craftsman
- Sunday, September 10 5 PM
Amit Dutta
India, 2017
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Dutta’s magical new film follows an eighth-century architect across the lower Himalayas in search of a temple site, a voyage that becomes a spiritual quest. With short The Future of Cinema.
Amit Dutta: Three Shorts on Indian Painting
- Friday, September 8 4 PM
Continuing the exploration begun in Nainsukh, three shorts—Gita Govinda, Field-Trip, and Scenes from a Sketchbook—see Dutta experimenting with radically different approaches to the master and his artistic descendants.

Introduction by Robert Del Bontà
The Seventh Walk
- Thursday, September 7 7 PM
Amit Dutta
India, 2013
Dutta returns to northern India’s Kangra Valley to consider the region’s legends, folk tales, and rich visual arts through the creative process of the contemporary landscape painter Paramjit Singh. With Dutta’s dreamlike short To Be Continued.

Introduction by Max Nelson
Nainsukh
- Wednesday, September 6 7 PM
Amit Dutta
India, Switzerland, 2010
Dutta painstakingly recreates the eighteenth-century artist Nainsukh’s brilliant miniature paintings through sumptuous compositions set amid palace ruins. With Museum of Imagination: A Portrait in Absentia, on the great art historian B. N. Goswamy.

Introduction by Max Nelson
Even Red Can Be Sad
- Sunday, September 3 5 PM
Amit Dutta
India, 2015
An intricately mosaicked portrait of nonagenarian artist Ram Kumar at home and in the studio. With short Chitrashala, which brings to life a series of painted tableaus in a former palace.

Amit Dutta’s Cinematic Museum

September 3–10, 2017

“In Nainsukh . . . I wanted to attempt to create what I saw in the paintings. All my formal work is an attempt in that direction.”
—Amit Dutta

For André Bazin, the most ambitious films about painting are those that attempt to “provide the painting with a new form of existence . . . an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting.” The French critic would have found much to admire in Amit Dutta’s dedication to working through this difficult synthesis. Whether examining India’s contemporary artists or classical painters and the scholars who know their every brushstroke by heart, Dutta’s process-oriented films attest to the ardor of art history.

“In Nainsukh . . . I wanted to attempt to create what I saw in the paintings. All my formal work is an attempt in that direction.”
—Amit Dutta

Born in 1977 in Jammu, Dutta enrolled as a student at the Film and Television Institute of India after a fateful encounter with a book of Ritwik Ghatak’s letters. After directing several short films blending elements of documentary and fable, he delved into the world of painting with Nainsukh, an absorbing study of the eighteenth-century painter based largely on meticulous re-creations of his compositions. Like a catalogue raisonné sprung to life, the film is as attentive to the particulars of pigment as to the mythic scenes being depicted, with cinema itself freshly elucidated in the resulting interplay of fantasy and realism. Far from a one-off, Nainsukh initiated a series of portraits, which together suggest an extended meditation on the nature of cultural transmission, the process by which one artist comes to speak to another across mediums and centuries. Critic Max Nelson, who has written sensitively about Dutta’s work for Cinema Scope, joins us for two evenings. Robert Del Bontà, guest curator of the BAMPFA exhibition Divine Visions, Earthly Pleasures: Five Hundred Years of Indian Painting, also introduces a screening.

Max Goldberg, Guest Writer

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Amit Dutta’s Cinematic Museum is presented in conjunction with the BAMPFA exhibition Divine Visions, Earthly Pleasures: Five Hundred Years of Indian Painting, and is curated by Kathy Geritz. Max Nelson’s presentations are part of Afterimage: Filmmakers and Critics in Conversation, made possible by generous funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association®. The series is cosponsored by the Institute for South Asian Studies. Dutta's reflections on cinema, Many Questions to Myself: Notebook of an Indian Film Student (In Hindi, Published by Raza Foundation and Rajkamal) is due out in September.

Amit Dutta’s Cinematic Museum

September 3–10, 2017

Past Films

The Unknown Craftsman

Amit Dutta: Three Shorts on Indian Painting

The Seventh Walk

Nainsukh

Even Red Can Be Sad