Tar has generated a lot of discussion, and this seems to have been one of the main intentions of its director-writer. Ignoring of course the cries of the moralists, many important things have been written, both about the main theme of the film, power, and about its cinematic approach, the performances, etc. But little has been written in Greek about the music and the issues concerning her, as was probably expected.
I have a feeling that the film that Tar is diametrically opposed to is Visconti's Death in Venice. It is the film through which Mahler's 5th Adagietto became a worldwide hit, (let's not forget that Mahler's work in general was relatively unknown until the 1950s). There the composer-musician experiences a death (I know it sounds like an oxymoron), through a visual ecstasy. Beauty is in the teenager, in Venice, at sunset, there is not a single suggestion of music. On the contrary, Tar is one of the few films in which a theme is developed with self-contained excerpts from interviews, lectures, discussions, and this is perhaps what alienates and surprises those who are not used to the development of complete thoughts in cinema, and not so much in American cinema. more. If cinema is the composite of the visual and performing arts, in this film the main axis is time, as it is experienced through music and the development of a complete thought. After all, Lydia Tarr herself, addressing her musicians, says: "the experience of time is the main requirement in a performance", and elsewhere "forget Visconti", that is: forget Visconti's soft kitsch, we are in another era.
Certainly all these references to composers, conductors, musicians, styles, terminology of music become more interesting to someone who is familiar with them, but here we are, there is nothing extremely special about it. Names like Mahler, Beethoven, Bach, Bernstein, Furtwängler, etc., are very basic for musicians. But the question is: for which musicians? In the cinema in front of me sat a musician I know who left in the middle of the film, but he does not play "classical" music.
Here, in the film, especially on the stage of the Juilliard school, one of the most basic concerns that a musician of our time should have is touched upon: does European music, as it has been globalized through colonial or indirectly colonial tactics, have the right to be imposed as The music; And by extension, has the patriarchy, which was dominant during the heyday of European music, "contaminated" it irreparably?
These thoughts may seem exaggerated in Greece, but they are the prevailing trend in American universities, at least. One could here paraphrase the well-known book asking "who killed Bach?". The answer would be the same as in "Who Killed Homer": extreme, sterile academicism, bigotry and ignorance of the subject. After all, Max of the Juilliard stage refuses to deal with Bach's work because he was a macho man who took advantage of his wives by fathering them twenty children. Lydia Tarr opposes this view because she defends other, very important values that derive from this music. The film thus raises such concerns about European music and European culture in general to a much larger audience.
Beyond the obvious relation of film to musical things, for me its deeper relation to music is this: some musicologists claim that even the greatest musical works of the classical era, a part of a symphony e.g. is nothing more than the extension of a single fall (cadence, cadenza, I always wonder why the closing of a musical sentence, period, is called fall). This is the feeling the movie left me with. It's all one fall. Yes, unexpected.