Streaming: Recent Films of Amit Dutta

April 30–August 31, 2021

Indian filmmaker and writer Amit Dutta has created his own distinctive cinema through deep explorations of India’s artistic, literary, and cultural traditions. We present the premiere of a portrait of Krishna Baldev Vaid, along with other recent work and the landmark Nainsukh.

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Wittgenstein Plays Chess with Marcel Duchamp, or How Not to Do Philosophy
Notes on Guler
Nainsukh
If I go, where do I go?
Drawn from Dreams

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Streaming: If I go, where do I go?
Amit Dutta
India, 2021
Streaming Premiere!
April 30–August 31, 2021

At ninety-one, Krishna Baldev Vaid (1927–2020), a pioneer of Hindi experimental writing living in New York, feels at a loss for words. Yet he is eager to access the “dance of language,” to which he has devoted his life. With shorts The Scent of Earth and Ten Questions from a Critic.
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Streaming: Nainsukh
Amit Dutta
India, Switzerland, 2010
April 30–August 31, 2021

Dutta painstakingly recreates the eighteenth-century artist Nainsukh’s brilliant miniature paintings through sumptuous compositions set amid palace ruins.
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Streaming: Notes on Guler and Two Short Films
Amit Dutta
India, 2019
April 30–August 31, 2021

For Dutta, the principality of Guler, with its long history of artistic expression, “became a laboratory that I went back to again and again, engaging with various aspects each time.” Plus two shorts that further explore the cultural history of the Western Himalayas.
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Streaming: Surface and Depth: Recent Short Films by Amit Dutta

April 30–August 31, 2021

This program highlights the range of Amit Dutta’s recent explorations, reflecting his engagement with India’s art and artists—and through them, its myths and legends—as well as an ancient playwright and two modern thinkers.
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Streaming: Recent Films of Amit Dutta

April 30–August 31, 2021

“Cinema becomes a way of searching and learning through culture, history, music, beauty and eventually truth.” —Amit Dutta, Many Questions to Myself

Indian filmmaker and writer Amit Dutta has created his own distinctive cinema through deep explorations of India’s artistic, literary, and cultural traditions, both contemporary and historical. This season we showcase his recent shorts and features, including the premiere of If I go, where do I go?, featuring five visits with Hindi experimental writer Krishna Baldev Vaid. We return as well to his landmark Nainsukh, on the eighteenth-century painter. That 2010 film first took Dutta back to the Kangra Valley near his childhood home, a land from which he has since drawn much of his inspiration. Dutta, who characterizes his films as research- and process-based, notes: “I became very interested in indigenous knowledge systems and the workings of tribal/folk and classical modes. How could these systems produce such stunning works? What was the source?” Shambhavi Kaul describes his varied films as “travers[ing] genres, moving effortlessly from crafted scenario to spontaneous encounter, from mindful self-reflexivity to ghostly magic.” Whether in sensuous tracking shots past paintings on gallery walls or ancient sculptures in their original setting; animations of artworks that reveal their underlying effects; moments of improvised acting; or expeditions and visits with unanticipated results, Dutta’s evocative films find new and beautiful expression in dialogue with their subjects.

In 2017 BAMPFA presented several of Dutta’s films on Indian art in conjunction with the exhibition Divine Visions, Earthly Pleasures: Five Hundred Years of Indian Painting. View artworks from the BAMPFA collection in the exhibition brochure, written by guest curator Robert Del Bontà.

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Series organized by Film Curator Kathy Geritz and cosponsored by the Institute for South Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. BAMPFA thanks Tom Vick, curator of film, Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution.

Streaming: Recent Films of Amit Dutta

April 30–August 31, 2021

Past Films

Available Films

Streaming: If I go, where do I go?

Streaming: Nainsukh

Streaming: Notes on Guler and Two Short Films

Streaming: Surface and Depth: Recent Short Films by Amit Dutta