CINEMATOGRAPHIC RIGOUR

A CASE OF FOUR INDIAN FILMMAKERS

Amrit Gangar

After the Slumdog Millionaire won several Oscars not long ago, media persistently,
and loudly tried to make us believe that in the contemporary history of (Indian) cinema
there existed nothing else but this film; even the bubbly Bollywood got blurred for a
while; as if it was end of history. Well, the Bollywood behemoth too had been implying
that there was no other stream flowing on the Indian filmscape but the mystified
mainstream. All this happening in the land that essentially believes in non-absolutism and
multi-faceted ness of life and culture. Unfortunately, commissions and omissions of
media, particularly of electronic media, during the past decade or so, have changed the
‘mass’ mindscape substantially, illusioning myth into reality, fiction into fact. And in the
process there is lesser and lesser space that is stubborn enough to subvert it; constantly
keeping the human stream of consciousness on a flow that is naturally normal.

It will not take much effort to see that the coin is not one sided as it is made out to be, and
I am not talking about the so-called smaller budget multiplex niches. My reference here is
to a small but sturdy body of certain Indian (short) films. This is the realm that still takes
risk to face the mindless onslaughts of market economy whose ego was pumpingly
inflated before the American “bubble” burst recently. The makers of these films (their
length really does not matter like a painting whether it is small or big) are comparatively
young and thinking artists. A minority that follows previous Indian masters such as Mani
Kaul, Kumar Shahani and Kamal Swaroop among others. In this essay, I would like to
talk about the cinematographic works of four filmmakers viz. Amit Dutta, Vipin Vijay,
Ashish Avikunthak and Kabir Mohanty.

Strangely, when the world outside – film festivals, university circuits, film schools, film
foundations, and even film archives - does take a serious and respectful note of their
works, in India they remain inadequately exposed, debated and written about. The
reasons for such a situation could be many. One that keeps troubling me is the lack of
serious study of cinema. In the country of over one billion people and thousands of films,
there are barely a couple of film studies departments in universities, the rest all cater to
mass media or mass communication, arbitrarily presuming cinema to be a product for
only mass consumption. Products that sell are good, those that don’t, have no room in the
place that knows only buying, selling and rejecting. Obviously, such environment is
brutal for an artist-filmmaker. But as it has happened in the history of mankind, art
survives and so does the precarious artist. What is needed is to save the precious little
public space that sustains them and in turn saves the over-all social health and ecology.

Talking about these four filmmakers, what I find most interesting is the exploration of
temporal sensibilities in their works, in their own subjective ways. It is their approach to
time (along, of course, with space) that should demand our attention. By its very
svabhāva cinematography, I believe, is temporal, as most of the great cinematographic
works have sculpted in time. Interestingly, all the four filmmakers that I am going to talk

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about individually have largely worked on celluloid, exploring its optical potentiality.
Perhaps Avikunthak is more consistent and committed in this context. But nonetheless,
their acceptance of video is deeply care- and mind-ful. For them the video is not just an
easily manipulatable digital gadget.

Amit Dutta’s cinematography is minimal to the core and austere and I don’t think it is so
because most of his works so far have been made at the Film & Television Institute of
India (FTII) as a student-and-teacher-practitioner. His cinematography doubtlessly shows
depth and profound playfulness and that perhaps echo Kamal Swarup’s work and ideas at
least during his initial creative phase.

Born on 5 September 1977 in Jammu, India and brought up there, Amit Dutta joined the
FTII and graduated in film direction in 2004. Later on he had a brief teaching stint at the
National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad. He now teaches at his alma mater, the
FTII and also independently practices creative filmmaking. Amit Dutta’s films have won
several prestigious awards in India and abroad including FIPRESCI Award at
Oberhausen, Germany; Gold Medal at Bilbao, Spain; Golden Conch at the Mumbai
International Film Festival and two Indian National Awards. Besides having been
presented in numerous national and international venues, his works also occupy critical
mentions in the catalogue of Lightcone France, which envisages “alternative histories” of
cinematography from the standpoint of various perspectives and also in the book Cinema
of Prayoga, which traces the history of experimental cinema in India. His latest short film
Jangarh Film Ek is part of the international competition of the prestigious Oberhausen
Short Film Festival in Germany, 2009.

Well-known film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum called Amit Dutta an “extraordinarily

gifted Indian experimental filmmaker.” In Senses of Cinema, George Clarke called him,
an “accomplished Indian experimental filmmaker.” In the context of cinematographic
duree / duration (see Note at the end of this essay), I find Dutta’s films significant as he
is dealing with memory. His films such as Masan, Chakravak and Ksha Tra Gya, for
instance, seem to be merging the recesses of his mind with those of our own historical
pool of narratives – sort of macro and micro memories. As he told me in an interview,
“Like Proust, one may suddenly remember one’s childhood, and the memory of it is more
accurate and pure than the actual childhood. That’s what I am really interested in – the
pure memory.” Together they, as he says, become subjective, and form a web of this
particular kind of memory – memory of memory, so to say. For Dutta, the acquired
memory is also equally pure. In his films, Dutta seem to be creating a conflict between
these two memories. And I consider memory as duree, which offers cinematography a
temporality, evoking its essential svabhāva.

Dutta’s much acclaimed 2007 short film Kramasha (To be continued…) creates, along
with duree, a refreshing spatial environment. A play between the conscious and the
unconscious, the film weaves memory into time and space into memory. It preserves the
mystery of cinematography, as it were. Kramasha has been voted by the film critics of
Senses of Cinema as one of the Best Films of the Year 2007.Till the time of writing this
essay, I have not seen his last film Jangarh Film Ek, which is about the artist Jangarh

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Singh Shyam, who belonged to the Gond tribe, and when Bharat Bhavan was constructed
in Bhopal, J. Swaminathan brought him to Bhopal. Jangarh started working and painting
in the city and became very famous and then one day in 2001, he committed suicide in a
museum in Japan. Dutta, in fact, proposes to make a series of films on him and this being
the first, he has called it Film Ek.

With his short films, Dutta, I believe has brought in a new thinking and feeling
environment into Indian cinematography, through the multiple prisms of Kathasaritsagar
and other Indian narrative traditions, both oral and written, including the modernist
experimental writer Vinod Kumar Shukla; besides continental views of life, including
those of Gilles Deleuze’s book on Bergson. Some of Dutta’s films have been archived at
Oberhausen, Lightcone, France and Bilbao, Spain. Among the young filmosophers of his
age, I don’t find many counterparts to Amit Dutta in the Indian filmmaking practice.
However, the one that strongly needs our attention is Vipin Vijay – his works and
thoughts; and the necessary restlessness akin to an artist.

Nandini Ramnath of Time Out called Vipin Vijay, “Indian experimental cinema’s new
hot ticket,” and talked about his signature film Broken Glass that he made for the 2007
International Film Festival of Kerala in Thiruvanthapuram. Screened before every
festival film, Vijay’s film, said Nandini, “opened with a boy tied to the moon by a rope
and included image of a barking woman and a blue-faced look alike of the goddess Kali.
Two days into the festival, some viewers began to play a game. They howled along or
clapped loudly. Others jeered. Clearly, filmgoers who don’t bat an eyelid when a movie
transports its lead pair from Andheri to Alps in a matter of seconds couldn’t make much
sense of what was unfolding on the screen.”

As I referred to above, like Amit Dutta, Vipin Vijay (b. 1976) too explores
cinematography’s lila in duree - in time. And this promise is seen right in his diploma
film Egotic World or Unmathbudham Jagath that he made at the Satyajit Ray Film &
Television Institute, Kolkata in 2000. Egotic World deeply explores cinematographic
abstraction in time. And space - even while using actors. Significantly, it is the film based
on a profoundly non-narrative Yoga and Advaita Vedanta, a text of the scripture Yoga
Vasistham. The book is divided into six prakaranas or chapters, viz. Vairagya Prakarna
(Dispassion), Mumuksha-vyavahara Prakarna (Qualifications of a Seeker), Utpatti
Prakarna (Creation), Sthiti Prakarna (Existence), Upashama Prakarna (Dissolution) and
Nirvarna Prakarna (Liberation, the last is the longest one divided into purvardha (pre-)
and utarardha post-), a sort of prologue and epilogue. Presented as the discourse of the
great sage Vasistha and Prince Rama when he is in a sate of dispassion at a young age,
Yoga Vasistham is the longest text in Sanskrit after Mahabharata and Ramayana.

Vipin Vijay contemporises and secularizes the text narrativizing a boy of seventeen who
is entrapped inside an abode. He escapes from the Zone for a three days of perfect
freedom or bliss, and goes back to abode on the fourth day. Now he finds himself
elevated from the worldly pleasures, rejects liberation, attains sushupti avastha (deep
sleep) and merges into the Black hole bearing the sorrow of the future. The rest of the
characters who come towards him create the space-time orientations. The Boy denies the

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state of liberation and sacrifices himself inside an industrial belt. It is like a circular
agitation, which does not exhaust itself in ecstasy and begins to gain from it. I choose to
write about it at length because it is a student’s diploma film and in a way we would
immediately think of the institute that allows nurturing of such a philosophical-
cinematographic quest – in the Age of Greed that we are living in. In black & white,
Egotic World looks monumental for its locational choices and takes and its profound
delineation. Vijay describes himself as a small-town boy from a “rabbit hole for any
Alice to weave stories.”

Fusing archival footage, memories and commentaries on politics, Vijay’s short film
Video Game won the prestigious Tiger Award at the Rotterdam International Film
Festival. A personal journey about life and nature, Video Game uses a motor-car (as in
video games children play) alluding, as if, to Ritwik Ghatak’s memorable film Ajantrik
(1958) that for the first time in Indian cinema explored man-machine relationship while
epically humanizing the narrative in multiple contexts. Vijay seems to be paying a tribute
to this master through this gem of a film. He had shot Video Game in Purulia (West
Bengal) where he had shot Egotistic World earlier. Not bound so much by a written
script, it is the randomness (time) that I find Vipin Vijay’s cinematographic works
significant for. He seems to be pushing the essential time, at times, into strange
‘mythological’ spaces to reflect upon modern times.

For his filmmaking, Vipin Vijay has received grants from various foundations in India
and abroad. In 2003, he received the Charles Wallace Arts Award for research at the
British Film Institute and India Office Records, London. He received support from the
IDFA, Amsterdam; IFA, Bangalore; Majlis, Mumbai and PSBT, New Delhi for his
works. A multiple award winner, Vipin Vijay’s films have been shown at several film
festivals across the world. Two of his films have been acquired for permanent archive at
the US Library of Congress. Vipin is at present working on a feature film with a support
from the Hubert Bals Film Fund, Rotterdam. His feature film project was invited to 3
Continents Film Festival 2007, Nantes, Paris at Produire au Sud to represent India.

Slightly older than Amit Dutta and Vipin Vijay, Ashish Avikunthak (b. 1972) provides
yet another gripping example of Indian cinematography that steadfastly believes in its
temporal (-spatial) explorations through the individual narratives or non-narratives that
they embark to weave. Avikunthak has been making films in India from the mid nineties.
His films (several as special retrospectives) have been shown in various film festivals
around the world and other venues, including Tate Modern, Centre George Pompidou,
Paris and Pacific Film Archive, Berkley. Kalighat Fetish won the Best Documentary
award in 2001 at the Tampere Film Festival, Finland. He has recently finished his first
feature length film, Shadows Formless, which had its world premier at the Locarno Film
Festival in 2007. He has a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University and
currently teaches at Yale University.

Avikunthak does look at filmmaking as ‘sculpting in time’ as the great Russian director
Andrei Tarkovsky puts it. In fact, Avikunthak’s foray into filmmaking was directly an
attempt at playing with time. The case in point is his short film Et cetera (1998), which is

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a tetralogy of four separate films, thematically coherent within a conscious bonding and
exploratory in nature. They seek to examine the various levels at which the reality of
human existence functions. Et cetera is an attempt at engaging with real time, the fact
that they are single shot, single takes, unedited films. For Avikunthak, as a temporal
experience, they are most linear cinematographic narratives, most pure. In fact,
Avikunthak seems to be ‘slicing time’ in these films.

Interestingly, it is the haptic cinema that attracts Avikunthak. The term ‘haptic’ is used in
psychology to indicate the tactile, proprioceptive and kinesthetic senses. In a way it refers
to what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called ‘smooth space,’ a space that must be
moved through by constant reference to the immediate environment. Close-range space is
navigated not through reference to the abstractions of maps or compasses, but by haptic
perception, attending to their particularity. Deleuze and Guattari wrote, “it seems to us
that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a
haptic space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile), although the eye in
turn is not the only organ to have this capacity…”

Working mostly in 16mm, Avikunthak, as I understand, deals increasingly with optics,

thereby continuing with the traditions of the experimental film, which I call Cinema of
Prayoga. What is important is the way he temporalizes the haptic, the physical space.
The relationship between the living and the inanimate is the pivot on which the action in
the films occur. Avikunthak retains his engagement with duree in all his works but
perhaps more emphatically in Kalighat Fetish / Kalighat Athikatha (1999), Dancing
Othello / Brihannala Ki Khelkali (2002) and End Note / Antraal (2005) besides Et cetera.
Avikunthak’s feature film Shadows Formless / Nirakar Chhaya is based on the
Malayalam novella Pandavpuram by the distinguished novelist Sethumadhavan. Trapped
between two monologues, a lonely and abandoned wife’s fantasy comes to life when the
paramour she invokes springs forth and transforms her reality. On such narrative anchor,
the film quite delicately retains its temporal moorings. First premiered at the Locarno
International Film Festival in 2007 and later at different venues, at MIACC Film Festival
in New York it was also honoured with an award.

In age, oldest of the four, Kabir Mohanty’s engagement with cinematography goes back
to his days at the University of Iowa in North America, where he studied film and video
making. Prior to that Mohanty (b. 1960) had studied economics at Presidency College,
Calcutta. Mohanty’s films and videos have been shown at many festivals and art venues
in India and abroad. He has received support in the form of a number of international
grants and awards. From September 2002 till June 2004, he was a Visiting Scholar in
UCLA’s Department of Art in the USA.

With video, he developed a special relationship after having seen the works of such
masters as Vasulkas, Nam June Paik and Bill Viola. Video provided Mohanty an
opportunity to do, what he calls, ‘solo’ works that he was contemplating for many years.
Video always made more sense to him as a ‘solo’ praxis – like a musician or a painter.
However, in the process of choosing video, a lot of thinking had gone into it – about the
intrinsic nature of video per se. The first single channel video that Mohanty made was

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called Home (1996). It pulsates in duree, in time and to achieve that in video one needs a
meditative approach, a sustained belief. Film (celluloid) making for Kabir is like an
ensemble, a jugalbandi. It was while shooting his short film and now i feel i don’t know
anything (on 35mm), the Dhrupad singer Bahauddin Dagar told Mohanty that the
director’s interaction with his fellow artists – cinematographer, actor, et al – was like a
jugalbandi. Obviously, Mohanty does not subscribe to the auteur theory. Interestingly,
Mohanty now feels that both solo in video and ensemble in film are strongly related. By
alluding to music, Mohanty also alludes to time.

How does Mohanty approach his video studies? Interestingly, duree or duration for him
is a ‘section of time’. For him, this ‘section of time’ is not a shot because it accepts
dysfunctionality. As he says, ‘something accumulates in this time; something unfolds.
Nothing is left out, you are not editing, you are not putting things together later, you feel
a great sense of lightness. And at the same time, it doesn’t feel slight because a
phenomenal amount of energy has already gone into it.” As a matter of fact, Mohanty’s
video studies are very small scale-wise but still they acquire a certain level of
monumentality in their historic-philosophic resonances, even in their soloness. I think it
is his temporal tendency that makes his video practice transcend the obvious here-and-
now. Mohanty’s video making practice is like musicians’ engagement with music. In this
context, it is important to understand his approach. As he explains, “During the shoot, I
let many things go, someone coughing on the way, or a black spot intervening; in the
process there could be a lag, a dip, but there is always life because my mind is still alert.
In a conventional technical sense you can’t call this a shot. I think this kind of video
making practice might be making musicians feel closer to my work. It is the
practitioner’s sensibility moving in time. And I think video provides the experience of a
seamless time.”

It is Mohanty’s recent video work titled song for an ancient land I found achieving a kind
of monumentality that is perhaps rare for a video. Proposed to be a four-part work, song
for an ancient land draws substantially from the historian-mathematician D.D. Kosambi,
who had a very radical view of history that lived all around us. History at the Doorstep,
he would call. Mohanty finds history just outside his home in the Pali area of Mumbai’s
suburb of Bandra. It is all there in the fruit seller’s, in the cobbler’s, on roads, in trees - in
time. In duree that his rigorous videostudy deepens to transcend.

Mohanty believes that video’s relation to film has not been explored adequately well in
India as well as outside. Video, as he maintains, has a certain quality of sculpting. At
Iowa, his teacher (Leighton Pierce) who worked in films around the same time as Bill
Viola told him that Viola had inspired his films. Mohanty finds it interesting how a video
artist could inspire his contemporary counterpart in film. Bill Viola, who comes from
music background, has not shot on film ever in his life.

By now it is apparent that it is duree that runs through the works of these four
filmmakers, in its own rhythm and that offers a certain dignity to cinematography
(including video) it longs for. It is extremely easy to make or produce films like products
and sell them in markets, and like any other products they might sell well or not. They, in

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the final analysis, are doomed to find their place in the profit-and-loss ledger, real or
perceived, black or white!

Besides the obvious ‘temporal’ unities, I also find the ‘non-realist’ approaches that these
four filmmakers take to their cinematographic practice. This, as I believe, must have been
influenced by Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, and Kamal Swaroop among other filmmakers
across the world. Both Kaul and Shahani have questioned the very making of the lens
deriving from the Renaissance’s theory of perspective / convergence. As Kaul says, “The
effort in cinema has been naturally limited since the birth of the pinhole camera came
about through perspective itself. Perspective also provides an illusion of being or moving
in a three-dimensional space, leading up to notions of realism and realist structures of
narrative, which control the contemporary idiom in the cinematograph and generate
certain powerful cliches, including those that animate hyper-realist conventions.”

According to Kaul, convergence (or ‘climax’ in the conventional narrative) is very much
the fruit of a movement that runs from a foreground to a middle ground to a background,
casting a horizon where parallel lines are ‘seen’ to converge. After a series of minor
convergences the major climatic convergence winds up the argument of the narrative
discourse. Prior to the appearance of perspective, the epics and later the chronicles spread
themselves in the manner of poetic elaboration, expansive description, often not reaching
the climax in time when viewed against rhythms prevailing today. The termination of the
event, which, these days, would be built, developing into a climax, did in the traditional
texts suddenly appear at the very end. Fight against perspective has inspired many a
modern painter, writer, musician and filmmaker from the turn of the 20th century. (An
Approach to Naukar ki Kameez, Mani Kaul, Cinemaya, 31, Winter 1995-96)

It would be interesting to see and study the works of the four filmmakers referred to in
this essay in this background that look at cinematography as a radically different
dispensation. And here lies the hope for a cinematography that sculpts itself in time,
beyond the realist frame, as it were. Hope, perhaps, lies in their rigour of austerity.

Note: Without going into the complexity of the term duree, I have used it more simply in
the sense of Bergsonian duration, however, not in a sense of an objective mathematical
unit. It is rather a subjective perception of space-time. – AG

Amrit Gangar is a Mumbai-based author and curator.

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FILMOGRAPHIES

Amit Dutta
Keshkambli, video, 25 mins, 2002
Digital Room, video, 25 mins, 2002
Fireproof Room, 35mm, 5 mins, 2002
They Remained in the Shadows, video, 16 mins, 2003
Masan, 35mm, 10 mins, 2003
Chakravak, 35mm (cinemascope), 4 mins, 2004
Ksha Tra Gya, 35mm, 22 mins, 2004
MaPa, 35mm, 10 mins, 2005
Ka, video, 45 mins, 2006
Ramkhind, video, 90 mins, 2007
Kramasha, 35mm, 22 mins, 2007
Jangarh Film Ek, video, 22 mins, 2009

While at the FTII, he made ten student films and wrote a script for a Hindi feature film.
He also made a feature length documentary on the Warli tribe for the Department of
Anthropology, University of Pune. He also made a video installation commissioned for
an art gallery in Berlin.

Vipin Vijay
Tatwamasi, 2001
The Egotic World, 35mm, 2001
Kshurasyadhara, 2001
Hawamahal, 2004
Video Game, 35mm, Digital Video, 2006
A Flowering Tree, 2007
Legend of the Holy Potato, 35mm, 120 mins, 2009 (a feature film about to be completed)

Ashish Avikunthak
Etcetara, 16mm, 33mins,1995-98
Kalighat Fetish, 16mm, 22 mins, 1999
Rummaging for Pasts, Digital Video, 27 mins, 2001
Dancing Othello, 16mm, 18 mins, 2002
End Note, 16mm, 18 mins, 2005
Shadows Formless, 35mm, 82 mins, 2007

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Kabir Mohanty
Eldon Moss, 16mm, 30mins, 1986
Angela, 16mm, 30mins, 1986
Riyaaz, 35mm, 15mins, 1990
When hungry eat, when tired go to sleep, Feature film script, 1993. Hubert Bals Fund
Award, International Film Festival Rotterdam
Fond Sud grant, Ministry of External Affairs, France
Home, Video, 28 mins, 1996
and now i feel i don’t know anything, 35mm, 35mins, 2001
night I, Digital Video, 4 mins, 2004
6’58”, Digital Video, 7mins, 2003
mountain, Digital Video, 2.5mins, 2005
dwelling, Video and Sound Installation, 2006
song for an ancient land Part I (of four parts), Video Essay, 51mins, 2006
handheld, Video Installation, 2008
KM’s works-in-progress:
Song for an ancient land, Parts II, III and IV, together 200mins, making the entire work
250mins or approx. 4-hour long.
Untitled, Sound Installation with recorded tracks and live microphones, with Vikram
Joglekar, sound recordist and designer, based in Rome, Italy.
Untitled, Video Installation in collaboration with dancer Padmini Chettur.