Live or die, life is really short and it’s meant to be lived. Everyone gets to choose and never give up. I’ve been on airplanes millions of miles everywhere. It’s my passion. You get on a plane that is going towards the unknown and you are told that you are welcome. That’s when I feel alive. I have met many people, some of them have stayed in my life, and some have not. You shouldn’t be afraid of life; you should live it with a smile and courage. You never know when the last day will be.
an online post
When the British playwright and screenwriter David Hare was meeting with Steven Spielberg sometime after the release of the film The Hours, which he had written, Spielberg said to him confessedly: “Everyone knows you have written the best screenplay of the year”, after which the renowned director looked down. It was in that moment Hare realised that he had not received Steven Spielberg’s vote for the Academy Award for the best screenplay of the year.
Now that the worst of awards presented to film are over for another year, some universal truths remain and are nowhere as noticeable as in how Tár, the film written and directed by Todd Field, dwindled away with hardly any of the more prestigious trophies in its wake. This is not to say that the impact of this highly ambitious and artistic film – both features to elicit frowns and uncomfortableness – cannot be felt even after many days of seeing it. As a piece of cinema, Tár, like its eponymous central character, stands alone, not entertaining enough to relax its viewer and not poetic enough to permit a full dismissal upon seeing it. For those who have become aware of the film merely as a cultural curiosity it represents exactly the kind of target for unbridled anger we have come to expect from cinematic art, now more than ever, when our universe is in constant danger and needs periodic rescuing from superhuman beings. What, says the moviegoer, to watch a lesbian conductor do what? What for?
Tár, like all great works of art, is about many things and hardly any of them are explicitly on its surface. It is simply not possible to walk away from it spouting conclusions such as life-affirming, tragic, gorgeous and mysterious, without the awareness of a more buried uneasiness undoing any full take on the experience. No sigh of relief for this work, no ‘putting cinema to its place’ without the guilt from a tendency to unculture oneself; to not have to face the world of contradictions or the questions (all of the deeper questions) still unanswered. In a word, no escaping from art. When a powerful work of art is presented to the public it is rarely met with universal praise or an immediate acceptance, because artistic expression – real, deep-seededartistic expression – cannot be met with indifference or banality. It can be banned and constricted, but to have a real take on it one would have to – heaven forbid – take a closer look, and in this act the socially acceptable veil of an approach to art (when so much of it is now restricted to demonetised no-longer-than-a-minute appearances to be glimpsed, swiped and forgotten) starts immediately to come down. Similarly, when a person is truly heard, and this is naturally one of the themes of Tár, only two things remain, a recognition through empathy and the stubbornness of a refusal.
To ignore the highest form of cinematic art is akin to refusing to see the world as it is. By saying no to a work of art the consumer (of culture, of life) is choosing a less cultured path, something to contain an ultimately boundless existence, and puts an importance on a hierarchy that is there to comfort and to lull to sleep, in shifting variations, but never far from the underlying message that art is in its place to service a society and the values within, and never the other way around. When a film such as Tár comes along, this agreement is in immediate danger of starting to disintegrate in the mind of the viewer. Watching a film seems an activity simple enough, safe even, and yet there are occasions when something outside of control starts emerge, the near-lifeless undercurrent starts to move, and at last the voice of an artist is heard. It pierces through political discourse, conversations about opportunity and rights, the truth about what remains important, through infrastructure and culture itself, and finally reaches the heart of the matter, morality. It is here that the greatest danger of all is revealed. The protecting and seemingly benevolent forces that run all the way through to the most revered institutions in a society (therewithin the ‘message’ to the masses) start to tremble with the slightest suspicion of art running wild, and while recent developments would suggest that the acceptance of the artist is gaining more footing than before, certainly in Western countries, this is quickly being replaced by the story of a societal awakening, of a country correcting its course, and hereupon the appeasement of any and every neglected sector of artistic people, now indistinguishable from other neglected groups, and the qualified critic who is inseparable from the one who simply gathers a following.
Nowhere is this take on art present as vividly as in the American film industry. The existential struggle that is ravaging through it on every level is narrowing many of its freer qualities, among them the celebration of art for art’s sake. The cultural shift has taken on such politically subverting elements that there is now one question to settle before all others: to remain American through and through, how can cinematic art continue to be a part of its surrounding society? To this day the greatest outcome of this struggle, still universally seen and heard, is the Academy Award for the best film of the year. I have no desire to take a stance here on whether films are political, since all art in one form or another is political, but to define the grievous destiny of cinema more accurately, it can be said that as much as artistic work remains political and in dialogue with the political forces of a society, it is equally a reflection of the kind ofpolitical environment that surrounds it. To remain free in one’s art, there are ultimately only two routes to take. Either the work is subjected to a specific political goal, however vague in detail, or the political discourse is made aware of itself, not only by criticising it, but by creating art powerful enough to illuminate the flaws of a unified vision for the world.
But what does it mean to step away from society itself? In the first place, the artist refuses whatever notion is given as the way things should be. This is no small feat, for if we keep with our example of the most dominating form of them all, the American art, to turn away from or to even show indifference towards a literally potent, unrivalled industry (as with entertainment, so with military), one is turning away from the American exceptionalism and the American dream, its liberal forces, its joys and abundant gifts, the promise of a unified world under one banner, and to a certain extent from behaviour and morality itself. Artistic work that refuses to show what should be and instead turns its focus on what is cannot be celebrated by a culture that is more concerned with an image and an impact on the world than on an authentic view of what there is behind a press conference pamphlet, and this is true of most Western cultures. The time we are living is terrible for art for art’s sake, because a social stranglehold is now forbidding financial forces from finding interest in the complexity of human life, and instead a light is shone on the relentlessly redeeming qualities of it; a heroine must rise, lost connections must be mended, forgotten truths remembered, obstacles overcome, and all human complexities resolved. In a phrase, good must continue to prevail. From here we return to Tár.
Todd Field’s third film has mostly been criticised for being pretentious and brooding, and this reaction culminates in the reception of the acting by Cate Blanchett. Works of art that address directly one or two of the inconveniencies that are present in the act of viewing itself are periodically pushed back and criticised for doing precisely this. When a film begins to communicate on the level of the awareness the viewer is having about the ongoing viewing, reactions are bound to be varied. It is easy to ironize this exchange, and the latter period of cinema is noticeably full of irony. In some ways this is an era of entertainment that can only be described as ironic, when budgets and brutalities are beyond comprehension, and the ever-expanding ‘messages’ are those of security, salvation, awareness, and acceptance. But when a film does not make a mockery of its thematic depth, when it doesn’t shield itself against the ironizing gaze, but rather opens up to represent a simple channel for conflicting human responses, when it neither shakes up nor pacifies, it has the potential of turning into an occurrence of a truly artistic experience. Among the many unspoken agreements the public is now having with cinema is that it can represent life in all kinds of ways but not become a part of life. Sitting in a movie theatre is still by and large an escape from something unbearable by itself, and however briefly, perpetual hope descends to eradicate a looming responsibility, and a life without art. Tár is a film that by all accounts cannot be enjoyed completely personally, and in fact it can be argued that this is one of its objectives, in other words, the refusal of anypersonal relief. The judging eye is put to the test, and the work of art finally stares back, as if to say, “This is what you are, no more than this, no less”.
Another point of contention though less frequently articulated is the intelligence of Tár. Popular artistic entertainment puts itself at risk by becoming intelligent, and the intelligent actor is the bearer of disappointment felt by the offended viewer. Thinking is still largely unacceptable activity in a movie theatre, and thoughts that are not easily articulated, worse still the ones that need illuminatingrather than verbal expression, eat away at the promised sense of comfort one is meant to experience before anything else. Artists the world over are accused of making a point about creating art, and this is faithfully presented to them as though the thought had never occurred to them in the first place, but a finished work that can withstand the entirety of accusations is closer to a monumental existence in a literal sense; not separate to the experience the shorts-wearing, phone-operating obedient tourist is having at the pyramids of Egypt or the Colosseum. There are moments when the ridiculousness of the endeavour rushes to the head, and the following thoughts are inevitable: What are we doing with these ruins, what is the point of them? What if we simply blew them to bits and carried on with our lives? Who would suffer from it? Ancient Egyptians? Romans? Once again, these are themes of Tár. Artistically speaking, the film is at its highest when depicting the preciousness of art, the obsession surrounding it, and the three letters easily rearranged to ridicule and obliterate it. It speaks as much to radical student theatres as it does to the concert-going public, but only a great artist, someone at the absolute peak of their craft, is able to communicate within that sweet spot, where art is both revered and frowned upon, without the viewer ever being absolved with a ruling. In the marriage of Todd Field and Cate Blanchett this resonant force is present in rare form.
The arrangement of counter forces in Tár is truly all-encompassing: women composers and conductors, lesbians, European life, high art, wealth, languages, exotic landscapes, psychology, female relationships, nazis – one building block after another saying to the man holding the financial reins: no, no, no, and for the last time, no. And yet the images that linger in mind days after seeing the film are of ordinary quality, more allied with how the experience of the world has now become to millions of people, to the vast mass that can now travel, enjoy culture and the arts, and have every opinion about life – in short, a vision of luxurious banality. We see a person coming home wheeling a suitcase late at night, we see corridors of hotels, we see an exotic waterfall, we see calming rivers, we see Berlin in all its worn-out polyphony, we see concert halls, European cafés, parks, good-looking and well-dressed people wrapped in thought, and things, things and more things. This multitude of things is what keeps Tár from becoming a purely elitist work. The viewer is the continuation of Lydia Tár, flawed and in a sense having accidentally stumbled into the world of classical music, eventually being held captive by the assigned position – as the conductor, as the film critic – and yearning for some kind of relief, of humanity even, where titles and past failings can finally wash away to reveal a person like any other, with as much potential for love and destruction as anyone. A film that can communicate to all levels of society in such expansive ways is popular art in the truer sense. Upon seeing it, Tár can be denounced, but it cannot be diminished in its effectiveness. It is the cinematic equivalent of a citizen stopped walking through a busy metropolis by a sudden political or humanitarian plea. Nothing quite hits the tax-paying consuming body like a foreign cry for assistance. In this shared understanding, in this intelligence, lies our real predicament. The viewer cannot help the opinion forming, as Lydia Tár cannot help being the great artist and behaving as such, and there is no unaffected state to return to anymore, for to denounce anytake on the film is to denounce one’s own intelligence, the very core of human existence and the source of cinematic art, among other things.
What I have wanted to say in this essay is that while there has been universal praise for the film Tár, there is something to be said about the fact that at the greatest film event of them all it was all but neglected. Not one Academy Award was presented to this film, and I cannot think that it didn’t have something to do with the seemingly more challenging aspects of it, with its unapologetic mixture of simplicity and complexity, of artistic and of decrepit, of East and West, and of being neither here nor there, and the greatest sin of them all, of not being about one universally understandable thing, or the kinds of things films are meant to be about, such as the importance of family, realizing one’s own value, making amends, overcoming insurmountable obstacles, finding a voice, etc. Surely a popular film cannot only be about art? But there it is, an artistic film like none before it, one not produced by recycling what is soothing or shocking to the moviegoer’s mind, but rather by pushing to the front that which is unpopular and nevertheless unquestionably still there, like the event from our past we wished to forget so badly we nearly succeeded at it over many years, until for whatever reason and quite disagreeably it surfaces again, forcing us to bear the entirety of our failings, of still remaining human despite our perfected story. But for all the film’s rawness, Tár is perhaps most surprisingly not unpleasant. (Another stroke of incredible artistic luck.) On the contrary, its viewing is mostly an enjoyable experience, and furthermore powerful in that it manages to introduce a character that has been missing not only in cinema but more pathologically in the attentive political discourse at large, and by default the consciousness of the citizen: the fearful, uncertain leader.
The discomfort felt at morally ambiguous deeds are no more than the fears of the experiencing witness manifested. We are unnerved by bad behaviour and simultaneously drawn to it, and a story that succeeds both at giving us space to purse our lips and position our noses for a downwards lookand simultaneously awaken our bloodthirst is worth the price of admission alone. Consider the climax of Tár, where our floundering protagonist charges the stage of a concert hall and pushes the substituting conductor down from the podium. What could be more inappropriate? What more embarrassing? How could anyone have misjudged their response so completely? And still, Lydia Tár isn’t entirely wrong. Even here, when her struggle for art is at its most absurd, her actions are not unrecognisable. Who hasn’t thought about what it would be like to conduct an orchestra or do anything in front of a full concert hall, inappropriate or otherwise? In addition to this, the greater themes of the film are revealed in this scene. This is what wewant from an artistic experience, this what we expect from a civilised society; an evening of classical music must be a safe space, certainly after tickets have been bought and behaviour fitted to the occasion.
Tár brings to mind two films of somewhat equal substance, Black Swan and The Square, but the main difference here is a lack of terror and an addition of empathy. The company of Lydia Tár is not altogether unpleasant, and at moments it is the very opposite of this. At the end she gets nothing less than what she deserves, and she bears her fate finally with surprising dignity. After the unbearable Europeanness and a few glimpses of New York, Tár is cast off to two locations where high art isn’t – at least not in the sense in which we consider it. Both places are interestingly left undefined. First we see the conductor return to her humble American beginnings in a detached suburban house, firstly to rekindle her love of music and conducting with VHS cassettes and in the next moment to be brutalised by her unsympathetic brother calling her Linda – again, when is the particular dynamic of families of artistic people ever discussed? –, and finally Lydia Tár leaves her Western surroundings entirely and ends up living, and conducting, in an unspecified Asian country. There are a few references to Marlon Brando, but otherwise we could be anywhere from India to Indonesia, at least to the forever-traveling eye. It is hard to think of a more appropriate ending if one wanted to pull the rug from under the all-knowing, all-seen cultured audience who has at long last concluded that it has been watching a film about somebody unknown to it. And then without warning the ultimate discomfort falls upon the viewer. A tropical landscape fills the screen, no language is understood anymore, and the way in which most people on the planet have been living all along, with very little prospects of change, is simply dropped to silence a self-important voice. All of this is pretention, of course, we have not left our comfortable cinema seats, and the difficult question about human value lingers to unite those who have never seen life outside a Western city, and those who dreamed of making it to be big city and sometimes in this process left their home countries far behind, the environmentally savvy and the pure consumer alike, all are united by the awareness of a paradoxical, counter-intuitive world we must share in one way or another, one which cannot really be discussed away nor made sense of with a soothing turn of a phrase. This world can only be looked at, and in this undertaking there remains no greater approach than art.
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