Amit Dutta’s fluid conception of art forms extends to the way he conceives of artists as well. Not bound by standardized, snobbish definitions that often consign folk dancers, weavers, and potters as skilled artisans or craftsmen because of their apparent entwining with religious tradition, folklore, and products (also addressed by Resnais and Marker in their Statues Also Die [1953]), thereby implying a form, which, seemingly unlike other hallowed art forms, doesn’t exist for its own sake, Dutta lets both “high” and “low” forms converse on an equal footing while sketching the traces of history and aesthetics that link them together. In this multidimensional space where forms and ideas collide, Dutta equally makes room for the peripheral characters — the critics, curators, and patrons — known mainly for their linkage to the world of art than as artists themselves. But the rasika (a person capable of grasping and relishing the “essence” or “soul” of the art; loosely, a connoisseur), in Dutta’s eyes, can open up new perspectives that expand our ways of engaging with the medium, even sowing the seeds for new art to spring up. His latest film, Eberhard as Seen by Amit, is on one such rasika, the ethnologist, art historian, and curator, Eberhard Fischer, and for fans of this director, the producer of his possibly greatest film, Nainsukh (2010). The latter film, though focused on the eponymous artist, also comments on the role played by his patron, Balwant Singh, in the deepening of Nainsukh’s art. This immediately puts this film in communion with Nainsukh, with the roles being reversed as the “art” takes the backseat for the curator.
In some ways, this is Dutta’s most conventional film, featuring a voiceover narration by the filmmaker in Hindi, which contains even statements of intent, either through direct address, such as “artists comprehending the past,” “the urge to create beauty,” or through Hindu philosophical parables on the interconnectedness of art forms. But this is a director who takes his title very seriously. Fischer is indeed seen throughout the picture, but barely heard. Dutta denies the illusory comforts of talking heads, and even relays their conversations through his narrations in Hindi or intertitles in English. His constant, disembodied voice obliterates any traces of objectivity, even if the invisible hand behind the camera is not always him. Fischer and his wife, Barbara, themselves double as artist and subject, be it in the use of their anthropological footage and photographs, or when Barbara shoots Fischer at their lakeside home in Ogiva, Switzerland, with Barbara even claiming that she took some of Dutta’s methodology from Nainsukh (Eberhard as Seen by Eberhard according to how Eberhard thinks Amit should see Eberhard, and so on). These layers — of objectivity, subjectivity, Fischer’s work and the content of his work, and Fischer’s life — penetrate into each other, threatening to collapse the loose linearity that moves from Fischer’s birth to his later projects through digressions, detours to the artwork concerned (special focus is on Fischer’s early work with the Dan tribe in Africa), philosophical meditations, and mediations sparked by Fischer’s footage (the aforementioned king parable), backtracks, and flash-forwards that bring his various projects in contact. As with his other films, Eberhard as Seen by Amit collapses all the rigid boundaries between art, religion, ritual, curation, tradition, and function, rendering Fischer’s approach to life through gardening, which prioritizes stillness, attention, engagement, and arrangement, as an organizational principle for Dutta’s frames themselves.
However, this collapse of boundaries also risks banal platitudinizing, particularly when describing the details of Fischer’s personal life, which are awkwardly shoehorned into the film. There’s the sense that Dutta is biting a lot more than he can chew, juggling multiple tonalities that don’t often cohere. Above all else, the film seeks to be a summation of Fischer’s multifaceted work, a cursory dive into the artworks discussed — with some dominating Dutta’s attention and others often relegated to a speedrun — a personalized portrait of Fischer, a chronicling of his life, and an elegy to B.N. Goswamy — an Indian art historian and a mentor of sorts to both Dutta and Fischer, whose death occasionally imbues the film with a reflective melancholy. Dutta’s weighted dissolves and staccato slo-mos do their best to resurrect the latter aspect, but his sensitivity is a little dimmed, perhaps by the sheer breadth and depth of his subject(s). More concerningly, however, is his glossing over of thornier questions regarding power differentials, wrought by Fischer’s position as a European outsider documenting civilizations unfamiliar to him. In a segment featuring the weavers from the state of Rajasthan in India, Dutta mentions that they were initially reluctant to share their methods, only to rather facilely resolve it with a pat quotation from Fischer on the “profound importance of documentation.” Clearly, the weavers did share their art with Fischer, but seldom has Dutta so callously smoothed his frictions, using the ends to justify the means.
In an early segment of the film, where Dutta pores over Fischer’s footage of the Dan tribe, something extraordinary happens: the ritualistic traditions and art of the Dan, which involve a combination of dance, performance, masks, and religion, possess the spirit of the film, even if only fragments of their art exist as footage. Dutta freezes on certain frames as the information is relayed, tinging them with a sense of foreboding through accentuated natural sounds and a minimalistic drone score. The dissolution of the boundary between performer and performance, where the loss of a tribesman’s mask almost equals the loss of his life, becomes incredibly moving for Dutta, and there’s the sense that all of the film’s threads converge at this very moment. But this doesn’t imply smoothing of any frictions, as both Dutta and Fischer are aware that the footage can only be viewed with a sense of loss. The villagers involved in the footage were killed in a civil war, and this disquiet continually lingers in the frames involving them. Dutta mulls over a question from Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror of Man during this segment, which asks if we study other cultures to understand the differences or to know how we are the same. Regardless of the answer, what is clear is that Eberhard as Seen by Amit is at its most wide-ranging and affecting in a segment that is the most alien to both of its makers, where acknowledging and confronting differences emerge not as hindrances, but as a necessity to profundity.
Published as part of Cinéma du Réel 2026 — Dispatch 2.
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