Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch TÁR
2022 · Todd Field · TÁR on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice where Tár sits in the frame early on. (camera)
Hoffmeister centers her in wide, stable compositions that hand her the whole room.
Payoff: The framing reports her standing in the world before the plot does anything to it.
Listen for sounds nobody else in the film reacts to. (sound)
Small noises sit under scenes, a hum or a tick, and she hears them while the room carries on.
Payoff: Her interior lives in the soundtrack because she is never permitted to explain it out loud.
Watch the bodies move during the conducting master class. (staging)
Field shoots the scene unbroken. Blanchett takes the floor and the room while the student retreats, so an argument about Bach and identity becomes a question of who is standing where.
Payoff: The staging poses the problem and declines to settle it, which is why people still argue over the scene. In the reading: discourse-image. An image that poses a problem it will not resolve is what the reading calls a discourse-image.
Count the reaction shots the film refuses to give you. (cutting)
Monika Willi, who edited for Haneke, lets scenes run past their usual exit points and cuts away from the face that would tell you how to feel. Nothing gets underlined or explained.
Payoff: You have to judge from behavior alone, which is the position every person in the story occupies.
Watch how Tár describes herself in the opening interview. (performance)
Blanchett performs a public self for a real journalist in front of a real festival crowd, shot like a document rather than a scene. The vocabulary, the modesty moves and the anecdotes are all constructed.
Payoff: She talks a version of herself into existence, and the film hands it to you as if it were fact. In the reading: story-telling / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a person caught in the act of legending herself into being.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Notice how little you are actually shown. The film never lies to you and never lets you be sure.