The films of Amit Dutta have always been concerned with exploring and re-imagining art forms through cinema, deepening the possibilities of both the art and cinema as an essayistic medium. This is true not only of the films dealing directly with artists and their work, such as Nainsukh (2010) and Scenes from a Sketchbook (2018), but also in works such as Sonchidi (2011) and The Seventh Walk (2013), where architectural expanses are being constantly reconfigured by leaps of the imagination. One art form is always nibbling at the boundaries of the other, intermingling and evolving by opening themselves to wider avenues while never compromising on the loose set of rules governing their forays into new territories. Such a fluid conception of art also opens up newer ways of thinking about art, be it in the form of studying the history of the medium (Museum of Imagination [2012]), organizing and presenting works of art (Chitrashala [2015]) or the community lifestyle around which the art develops and vice-versa (Notes on Guler [2019]). Though he has centred his works on art, architecture, and, more recently, philosophy, one could almost sense that it only would be a matter of time before Dutta would train his eyes (and ears) on the most abstract of art forms — music. And what could be a more fitting subject for this multifaceted artist (the reverse could also be true in some senses) than the legendary Hindustani musician, Kumar Gandharva?
A maverick and pioneer in his field, Kumar Gandharva’s artistry derives from his deeply felt philosophy and convictions of music and life. Rhythm of a Flower, Dutta’s latest, explores Gandharva’s music and life starting with a legendarily “fallow” period as inspiration. Gandharva spent six years of his life bedridden with tuberculosis, and, as legend has it, it was in this period he developed his unique bandishes (a particular kind of composition in Hindustani music) and Madhyalaya (loosely, neither fast nor slow) style of singing attuned to the gait of everyday life, be it in walking or birds chirping. Dutta’s film, filled with delicate and sensitive hand-drawn animations courtesy of children’s illustrator Allen Shaw, opens not with Gandharva’s singing, but with the very actions of a man walking and a bird gently flying. The latter lands on a long petal of grass, bending it almost in the way a musician might pluck the strings of a tanpura to set the tonic and pitch for the concert. And right on cue, we hear Gandharva’s music, followed by the bird departing from the stalk. Music, for Gandharva and Dutta, stems from nature itself, as nature itself is endowed with music.
The title is derived from a quote by Gandharva — “No flower blooms without its rhythm” — gracing the opening credits of the film. A creative biopic of sorts, the film embodies the musical philosophy of Gandharva even when it provides more conventional biographical details such as his place of birth and influences. Gandharva’s music never stopped when he was bedridden, as some of the intertitles taken from interviews of his caretaker attest. Gandharva was seemingly muttering notes and music even if he didn’t have the energy to do so, and regardless of the veracity of the claims, Dutta whole-heartedly projects a vast musical canvas onto his vivid tapestry of sights, sounds, and camera movements from nature and community life, out of which Hindustani music forms only a part. This might anger some passionate fans eager to listen to Gandharva’s music, but Dutta asks us to broaden our conceptions of art by actually contending with Gandharva’s musical philosophy.
Like Dutta’s previous works, he also uses the artist’s modus operandi as a means of thinking about cinema itself, especially through his audiovisual rhymes such as the tortuous camera movements that precede the entry to Gandharva’s house, first scored to the chirping of birds and then, at a later stage, to Gandharva’s improvisations of the raag. Dutta, like the great essayists in writing and cinema, does not limit his work to a mere exploration of the art form, but also mulls over how the art form itself can inform cinema. Rhyming cadences from nature are not secluded to the privileged domains of music, but are open to all art forms to explore.
Dutta’s gradual shift to animation in recent years is prompted not just by the medium’s ability to expand and collapse spatial planes, something which he achieved even in his non-animated works, but also by its capacity for morphing different forms. Trees, tanpuras, and yogis here meld into one another, the circularity in Gandharva’s music translates into the motion of a chariot wheel (which Allen Shaw mentioned was inspired by the Sun-Temple in Konark, India), and motifs from different art forms trickle onto the expansive canvas of Gandharva’s musical philosophy. The sheer density of ideas and paucity of narrative explanations might make the film seem esoteric and even forbidding to viewers unfamiliar with Hindustani music. However, late into the film, we hear and view Gandharva’s quote as an audiovisual intertitle on the need to go to a village where the walls are filled with cow dung in order to understand the Raag Sarang. Music springs from the mundane, and Rhythm of a Flower boldly asks viewers to imagine artistic possibilities in our way of life without offering any patronizing instructions on how to do so.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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