The work of filmmaker Amit Dutta is best understood as a conversation. His craft embodies a form of dialogue between different art forms, ranging from cinema, painting, literature, and music, which references art history and research. Emerging from the lineage of experimental filmmakers like Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, and Kamal Swaroop, Dutta very early developed a style of his own, wielding the camera like brushstrokes on canvas to create paintings that move. To provide an analogy, if the Renaissance perspective painting style was representative of conventional filmmaking techniques, then Dutta’s artistic practice aligns more with the tradition of Indian miniatures that rejects optical realism in favour of a more abstract epistemology. 

Not surprisingly, Indian miniatures have crept into Dutta’s oeuvre as a subject matter in his films such as Gita Govinda (2013) and Chitrashala (2015). Dutta’s most widely seen and discussed film, Nainsukh (2010), is also an imaginative biography of an eighteenth-century Pahari miniature painter from the Himalayan valley. It emerged from his visual interpretation of the extensive body of research conducted by B N Goswamy, an authority on Pahari painting, and Swiss art historian and ethnologist, Dr Eberhard Fischer. Dutta can rightly be called a “research filmmaker,” as his films are rooted in scholarly research and archival material distilled into cinematic form. 

One of the defining features of Dutta’s cinema is its playfulness with the medium, using sound, animation, and text. The Seventh Walk (2013), a film based on the paintings of an impressionist Paramjit Singh, offers a unique soundscape while the short film Wittgenstein Plays Chess with Marcel Duchamp, or How Not to Do Philosophy (2020), a camera-less cut-out animation, visually explores the philosophical essay of the same name by Steven Gerrard.

With an oeuvre of more than 40 films across a career spanning two decades, Dutta, in a wide-ranging conversation, revealed the creative trajectories that power his practice and approach.

Jatin Dagar: Could you take us through some of your early childhood experiences that subsequently shaped your work? 

Amit Dutta: My childhood was shaped by reading. Books were my first and deepest encounters with other worlds. My mother was a government school teacher and her school library had a wonderful collection, which I borrowed from, and read, as a student in the same school. I watched some films on our black and white TV but my exposure was accidental and never deliberate. I had no particular interest in cinema itself either as a viewer or as an aspiring filmmaker. For me cinema as my medium of expression emerged later like writing or music. I didn’t approach it as a career or a passion but as a natural extension of the literary and artistic concerns I was already engaged with. Another thing that shaped my imagination was the landscape I grew up in. Our neighbourhood was technically a refugee camp that came up after the 1971 war. It was a bare bones, newly-constructed town with little vegetation that embodied a sense of impermanence. But just across the railway track the vista would change. Within a kilometre, you would find yourself walking into a completely different world with undulating foothills, ancient banyan trees with hanging roots, and still, deep ponds. That contrast — between the starkness of where we lived and the richness just beyond it — left a strong impression on me. It was like living on the border between two realities.

Now, when I look back at my diploma films, I can sense this early influence of my childhood as those films were drawn entirely from my memories of growing up in that town.

Dagar: What was the first film you made?

Dutta: When I entered the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in 2000, the first exercise we did on VHS became my first film. The VHS camera was often dismissed as a wedding camera. I had seen it used in marriages in the late eighties. I still remember trembling as I pressed the record button. The initial exercises at FTII were called five shots and ten shots. My five shot film was simple. A man was reading in a library. He glanced at a wall clock showing five o’clock, closing time, and got up to leave. There was no clock in the library where I shot. I filmed it somewhere else and cut it in to make it look like [it was] part of the same space. That tiny edit felt like magic. I was very pleased. The ten shots film was about a chess game. I no longer remember its details.

Dagar: How do you arrive at the final form of a film? 

Dutta: That is a tough question, and one I often ask myself. How does one arrive at a certain form? I have not written a manifesto. To address these self-enquiries I once kept a diary called Many Questions to Myself. For me form does not come from a fixed method. It appears through something like the process of elimination in chess, where you find a move by first knowing what not to do. Certain rules and instincts guide me even if I have not put them into words. I keep searching for a rhythm and a kind of inner resonance. When the film begins to grow into something larger than itself and beyond its subject I feel the form has arrived. Or perhaps I have simply stumbled my way into it.

Dagar: How has working with Professor B N Goswamy altered or influenced your perspective of art history, and also of cinema as a visual medium?

Dutta: What I learned from him went far beyond art history. It was about hard work, steady interest, and a clear curiosity free from habit. He showed me how to stay involved in the world yet remain untouched by it. He often quoted an old Indian saying “Live in the world like the lotus — rooted in water, yet never wet.” That line has stayed with me. It shaped how I think about art history and my own practice.

Professor Goswamy had a special way of looking at art. He could find its inner logic and emotional depth. Whether it was a miniature painting or a sculpture — he was not just identifying a school or period. He was truly seeing. We spent long hours talking about art and many other things. He looked closely at every detail. The placement of a hand, the direction of a gaze, the thickness of a line. His way was not dry or analytical. It was intuitive and alive. It left a lasting mark on me.

Dagar: How do you find yourself engaging with the works of artists like Jyoti Bhatt, Nainsukh, and Jangarh Singh Shyam? Do you strive to reflect the artist’s original intention, or do you rely on your interpretation?

Dutta: Both, certainly. I try to keep the essence of the artist’s original intention, but I am also drawn to what the work might be saying without meaning to. That, for me, is often the most important part. I like to use the artwork to engage with something it may have influenced or touched beyond the usual frame of meaning. That residual energy, and the unspoken ripple effect a work creates, is what motivates me most. It is also the most mysterious aspect of art — what it does without knowing it does so.

Dagar: When you work for institutions like the Chandigarh Museum, the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) in Bangalore, and the Smithsonian Museum, how do you negotiate creative freedom as compared to your independent works?

Dutta: One thing has always been clear to me. The subject must align with my way of thinking and my interests, and fit within the overall shape of my work. I see my entire body of work as a single evolving piece, like a mosaic or collage. Every project, no matter how small, must find its place in that larger composition with harmony. So whenever I take on a subject, I choose it with this in mind. I have also been fortunate that these institutions have given me complete creative freedom. They never interfered even when I made something quite different from what they expected.

Dagar: What draws you to animation as a medium, and how do you collaborate with animators to translate your vision? 

Dutta: What draws me to animation is that it gives me a kind of precious solitude. I write and plan the film on my own and then send instructions to the animation teams. They interpret the material in their own way, and often add much to my first vision. We meet online to discuss it, but I usually handle the final edit and sound myself. This process enables both collaboration and reflection, which I value deeply.

My way of working with animation is intuitive, and a bit unusual. Sometimes, I do not share the full idea of the film with the animators. I send one image at a time and let them interpret it. When I receive the footage, I re-edit it, and, sometimes, reshape it completely. At times they are surprised or even disappointed by what I do, but that is how I find the essence of what I want to express. My process starts with deep reading on the subject. For a while, it feels like I am making a didactic essay. Then suddenly, it changes and becomes freer and more mysterious, as the subconscious begins to guide it. This change is precious to me. 

I often work in isolation. I do not avoid collaboration but I prefer an inward rhythm that can only be found while working alone.  Filmmaking is often seen as a collective art and it is. Yet for the kind of films I make, a certain solitude is needed to create room for the unexpected to enter.

Dagar: After making over 40 films, what still excites you about the medium? What are you drawn to exploring next?

Dutta: I feel I have barely scratched the surface. There is always a lingering sense of dissatisfaction with what I have done. For a few days after finishing a film, I feel relieved and even pleased. When I return to it a month later, a strange unease creeps in, and I begin to feel I have missed something essential or lost it along the way. That recurring feeling becomes fuel. I tell myself the next film will be better and clearer and closer to what I meant to say. Then the cycle repeats. What is even more mysterious is that years later, I might suddenly come to like a part of a film I once disliked. It feels as if my own mind has hidden folds I cannot predict, and that keeps me going.

Dagar: Historically, the way cinema has been exhibited made it ‘mass medium,’ as opposed to other arts forms. How do you engage with the idea of cinema and its audience? 

Dutta: Frankly, I do not know anymore. I have mostly given up the idea of shaping the world according to my preferences. When I was younger, I had strong ideas about how cinema should be shown and how audiences should experience it. Over time I began to see the futility of trying to control such things. I have come to accept that the world moves in its own unpredictable rhythm.

Still I believe the act of seeking is important because I have gained from it.  When I search deeply on a subject and come across a long-forgotten book on it, out of print for sixty years with no one reading it, it feels like finding a treasure.

I live with its ideas for months. That excitement is powerful because I sought it out and had prepared myself for the encounter.

Yet, I also value the other path — the accidental discovery. Sometimes something remarkable finds you without your looking for it, as Doordarshan did for many of us when we stumbled upon an obscure art film on a Saturday evening as young and uninitiated viewers. You were not expecting it, yet it changed you. Both paths have their place, the one shaped by seeking and the one shaped by wandering.

Jatin Dagar is a recent MA graduate in Arts and Aesthetics from JNU. He writes on art history, cinema, and visual culture, exploring contemporary artistic and cultural practices.