Amit Dutta’s films are exercises in the modulation of time. His attention to rhythm, silence, and tempo creates a cinema that unfolds like a piece of music played adagio, while the images seem possessed of their own breath and life.
Chitrashala (House of Paintings) is set in the Amar Mahal Palace Museum in Jammu, home to a suite of 47 Himalayan miniature paintings executed by the family workshop of the master painter Nainsukh. When the gallery is empty of visitors, the paintings—based on a twelfth-century Sanskrit epic poem telling the love of Nala and Damayanti—come to life…
Dutta’s conversation across the centuries with Nainsukh continues in Scenes from a Sketchbook. The short film takes inspiration from the eighteenth-century painter’s tinted brush drawings, in which remarkably refined passages sit beside “unfinished” sections in which it is possible to see the preparatory sketching and to trace the workings of the artist’s mind. In attempting to reproduce these methods on film, Dutta pays homage to a master and celebrates the process of imaginative leaps by which a work of transcendent art is made.
