This article looks at filmmaker Atin Bajaj’s filmmaking practice, tracing how his work draws from Soviet montage theory, experimental form, and sensory editing to build meaning through the collision of image and sound. It highlights his key works such as 'As for the Fall', 'Anarchitecture', and 'Dangling Carrot Running Horse', his formative years at FTII, and his influences from Chris Marker to Payal Kapadia.
The art of cinema often rests on a basic insight: meaning is shaped not only by what you see but by how images are assembled. Early Soviet filmmakers demonstrated this with clarity — Lev Kuleshov’s now-famous experiment showed that viewers derive meaning from the juxtaposition of shots rather than the shot itself, while montage theorists like Eisenstein argued that ideas and emotions emerge when images collide in sequence. Their work shifted attention toward form, rhythm and contrast, laying the groundwork for films that rely on fragments, textures and sensory cues rather than linear narratives. This framework lies at the core of filmmaker Atin Bajaj's practice, whose work uses montage as the language through which meaning is built.
Atin's short documentary-style works emerge from working with fragments of visuals and sound and seeing what kind of emotions they can invoke when they start to interact with each other. For the filmmaker, form is the means by which content becomes evocative. “I like to play with the film’s form to create a sensory experience that makes you feel something rather than focusing on narrative clarity,” he explains. This insistence aligns his work with the logic of montage theory: meaning is produced in the arrangement, the rhythm, the clash and interpenetration of image and sound, rather than a discursive exposition.
“FTII really helped in broadening my understanding of cinema and then developing my own grammar for this medium. You’re exposed to a huge amount of films every day at the Institute. Understanding the history of cinema and the various movements within it helped solidify this understanding of how form and intent go hand in hand.”Atin Bajaj
In 'As for the Fall', he turns his camera to the campus of Film & Television Institute of India (FTII). “It evolved as we started to focus on the contrasts within FTII in terms of old and new structures. Finding the man cutting a tree was a happy coincidence that I immediately knew would serve as the crescendo for the film. I tried to capture the feeling of the Institute’s past and make it collide against the present reality," he shares.
'Anarchitecture', shot during the Covid lockdown, utilises footage of a housing society and collects factory sounds that the filmmaker found 'beautiful yet haunting' to evoke a sense of monotony and unease. For him the film became an exciting exercise of sonic world building. Meanwhile, for 'Dangling Carrot Running Horse', directed by his friend Jayesh Joshi and also made at FTII, they shot and edited the documentary in two days with the intent of making the viewers question and distort their idea of time. Across all these works, Atin describes his ethos as,"...chasing that synergy between emotion and structure — between what I want to say, and how the form itself can make you feel it.”
Atin's influences span filmmakers who also play with boundary and form — Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Payal Kapadia and Ciro Guerra. He remarks, “I have a strong bias for filmmakers who are playful with the medium, like working with mixed media or blurring various boundaries and boxes that are generally used to categorise films.”
For Atin, creation functions as a way of marking time — a method of turning moments, spaces and states of mind into a personal record he can return to later. The act of documenting time and space runs through his work and shapes the decisions he makes while building a film. His focus on sensory experience naturally pushes him toward textures, abstraction, and experimentation, which often results in films that sit outside conventional narrative structures. “Besides that, I have a deep, deep love for human stories, no matter what colour or shade they belong to,” he notes.
Follow Atin here and watch one of his films below:
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