Frioul  

The atmosphere on this archipelago, just off the coast of Marseille, was so intense; the dry, chalky texture of the sandstone, the light air, the succulents and arid plants growing between rocks, the dust trailing down winding paths.  When I was there a couple of weeks ago, I felt a really strong connection to the landscape, so earthy and free.  For the next film I make, which I'm going to make about a very specific mountain landscape, I want it to be so tuned in to the atmosphere of the landscape that it goes beyond simple representation. 

 

A Letter from London

A two minute film I made over July-August, shot on super 8 and transferred to digital video.  Filmed along the River Thames, around Bank, and in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.  First shown at D'shut in Melbourne, at a screening organised by my good friend Simone.  I thought of the film as a little letter or drawing sent to all of my friends that I miss back home in Melbourne. 

Thanks to Robert Frederick Green and On8mil. 

Boats 

Recently been thinking about intimacy felt from a distance, and about boats and travelling, while spending my evenings filming on the banks of the Thames.  I'm putting together a film shot on super 8 about boats called 'A Letter from London.'  It's going to be shown at a screening alongside work made by friends in Melbourne on 5th September.  More info here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-kEg3pxMY_/?hl=en if you're interested in attending. 

June glimpses

Thinking about the beach, a boat, and Harmony Korine's paintings which I saw when Sophia came to London.  

Lists

When settling into a new place, the littlest things are given so much importance so as to create an organised and comfortable environment. 

shoe polish

hair cut

lamp

new notebook

film stock

last night I watched incense burn away into ash: 

Dwellings 

I keep going back to edit this blog post because I keep seeing 'little' things which attract my attention. Today it was the vegetable allotments on the other side of a river. The ramshackle little garden sheds are fantastic. They've been pieced together from old building materials; tarpaulin and corrugated iron which make them look as though they have been hanging on precariously through the harshness of time. 

             

Networks

Everyday I watch different animals use the extensive network of rooftops outside my window to get from one point to another. Today it was one of the local cats, yesterday it was a fox, and the other day, a squirrel. 

To get to work, in fact to get anywhere in London, I often have to transfer from one train to another. Criss-crossing along intersecting paths, like these animals.

The pylons 

I've just moved from one room to another in the same area of London. Despite the change, the one constant has been my proximity to these electricity pylons which run through the suburb. The first place was isolated amongst bushland, next to a river, with one pylon looming large over it. Once I settled into my new room, I looked out the window to study the view, and sure enough, there was a pylon. Despite their bleakness, the field of pylons and their interconnecting wires have become like a path, or a symbol of hope, or kind of synonymous with my situation. They've followed me from one place to another, connecting places, memories, stories, etc. 

London

In London, I attend the BFI Southbank two or three times a week. Although I realise that that isn't quite as often as the lonesome man that Jeremy Cooper wrote about in Brian, so far I've seen some really good things there: The White Diamond by Werner Herzog, a John Waters film, and the only film Jean Genet made, Un chant d'amour. Every time I go there I need to go for a walk afterwards along the Thames in order to decompress from whatever film I've seen. Over the years, I've always seen things that have interested me after leaving the BFI, such as people mudlarking with head torches on, or a city fox, or an unusual building. This is what I came across the other evening: a man performing with fire on the shoreline. It was really beautiful... the light of the fire melding with the city lights that reflect on the water. My iPhone camera couldn't handle the movement of the light, so all the images came out blurry, which I really like. I wish I had my super 8 camera with me...

Red flower / The Zone of Interest

Just before I left for London, I noticed this one red flower that had bloomed in my parents' garden. 

It reminded me of a series of images that appear in Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest. There's a section that contains successive close-up shots of flowers; different kinds of dahlias, echinacea, peonies. There was also another series of red flowers that sinisterly appear in Richard Mosse-esque infrared. The film is largely set within one garden, where its tidiness and beauty is constantly maintained in the midst of barbarity. The flower images seduced me into a calm feeling, as did many of the other images, until I got to the end of the film, and my complacency hit me. I won't give anymore away, but I found the film a truly inspiring and important experience.

As for my mum's flower, the day I left for London, I photographed it; now picked and artfully arranged in a little vase in the bathroom. 

Tacita Dean at MCA, Sydney

The current Tacita Dean show at MCA is fantastic. As I purchased a ticket, I was informed that there was over three hours worth of films to view and that I was allowed to duck out for fresh air or for something to eat as frequently as I needed. The first work that I viewed upon entering the gallery was the 16mm film Buon Fresco. The film painstakingly documents a Giotto fresco in an Italian basilica, one close-up detail at a time. The images focus on the rigours of artistic process, particularly where Giotto had made mistakes or redone something, minor textures that wouldn't ordinarily be seen from a distance. This film set the atmosphere for the show; for the work requires the viewer to adapt to a slow pace, to consider each consecutive image for its own worth, while also framing Dean's interest with things trapped in the past. 

I loved all of the film work that was presented, but one of the highlights was a portrait of the artist Claes Oldenburg. The work had this kind of ghostly quality as you would watch Oldenburg potter around his studio in a golden hue of sunlight, and watch as his hands inarticulately drew across a sheet. He was devoid of any sense of self consciousness, his attention devoted entirely to his work. What I particularly liked about Dean's work was the sound design which heightened the whirs of the world outside to a kind of eerie effect. I watched it twice, just so I could focus on the sound of cars beeping, sirens, and the echoes of distant conversation.. I later read that Oldenburg died the year before the film was finished, and it is this sort of uncanny link with the dead or the past that lingers over Dean's work. 

Claes Oldenburg draws Blueberry Pie, 
16mm, 2023, Tacita Dean

Self Portrait/AIDS Garden

A recent film that reflects on time, memory, and place.

Progress

New project

I'm trying to make a seven minute film about time and memory, shot quickly on a simple digital camera. 

These images below are from the AIDS Memorial Garden in Fairfield: an overgrown, seemingly forgotten place of solitude, filled with reverberations of memory. Amongst the native grasses and foliage are hints of beauty: native flowers, a patch of sunlight filtered through the trees, a hidden plaque. I'm still trying to figure out what to focus my camera on, hence these blurred images. I hope to complete the film by the end of September. 

Brief reflections on three images 

Beau Travail  Claire Denis

On a recent rewatch at the cinema I got a lot out of allowing myself to 'feel' Beau Travail's images rather than constantly look for subtext or meaning within them. The film's sensuality and quietness had an enrapturing affect on me as a result. This time I found myself intrigued by simple and quieter images, such as one where a flicker of light is seen in the dark as a cigarette is lit. The hands of two male legionnaires meet around the flame in one of the film's more direct expressions of intimacy. The camera stays on the cigarette, and all we see is a little dot of light bobbing around in the dark. I love how Denis renders seemingly insignificant things incandescent and alluring, often to convey a sense of the magic of solitude.  

Denis's habitual images of people dancing passionately on their own seems to exemplify this. I recently read an interview where Denis described these images as a 'solitary appeal to the empathy of the viewer', where 'unspoken correspondences' come to light. These images are a way of coming into contact with something 'intangible, mysterious and transformative.' I think this modest image of the cigarette in the dark can be read in the same way. It hints at an inarticulate solitude that is magical and beautiful, and it felt sublime to me.

A flicker of a cigarette: Beau Travail

The Brown Bunny  Vincent Gallo 

The Brown Bunny follows a man (Gallo) as he aimlessly drives across various American states, and contains subtly beautiful images that distill loneliness and yearning.  Many of the images are out of focus and awkwardly framed, often softly filtered through hair or a dirty car windscreen, to express the introspective fog through which Gallo's character views the world.  This creates an emotional distance within the viewer, a kind of numbing, which gives you the sense that Gallo is so overcome by melancholy and loneliness that he has become a shell of a person, only able to feel subtle textures and colours.  

Aimless driving: The Brown Bunny

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul  Rainer Werner Fassbinder

When I watched Ali I was struck by how simple, but powerful, the film's portrayal of loneliness was.  The film is about the relationship between an older woman and a migrant worker from Morocco, two outsiders who suffer the prejudice of postwar West German society.  A sense of stillness pervades the film's images, with many shots of people sitting alone in empty spaces and encountering their own loneliness.  A recurring example of this is an image of the woman resting on the staircase of her apartment building, which is where she encounters the judgement of her racist neighbours.  The staircase appears as this liminal space that lies between the woman's interior world and the alienation of the world outside.  The framing of the woman through the columns and pipes of the staircase directly communicates, in the most simple way, that the woman is trapped by her own loneliness.    

An excerpt from an interview with Fassbinder: 'the viewer has an opportunity to flesh out the relationship when the story is simple.  The simpler the stories are, the more the viewers can do with them... at some point films have to stop being films and have to come alive so that the viewers begin to ask themselves: what about me and my life?' 

  

An expression of loneliness in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Flights

I've recently developed a fascination with tracking planes that fly over my house in the evenings.  

I see them from a distance as dots of light, and watch them as they edge closer and closer, until I hear them pass overhead. I think the obsession has something to do with a strangely addictive feeling of distant intimacy, or is perhaps related to longing for a world beyond Melbourne.

'Flightradar24' informed me that these two flights originated in the Middle East:

Two dots of light in the distance

An elegy for forgotten spaces

I've always been interested in the use of neglected spaces, such as disowned empty sites and laneways, to make something beautiful and thoughtful. As a teenager, I used the lane behind my home to display sculptures I made from locally found detritus. The lane was somewhere I could retreat to after a school day and provided company with neighbours who are practising artists. They would offer encouragement, critique and share books or the names of other artists I should seek out. It was an inspiring social and artistic antidote to my secondary schooling. I cared for the lane for five years until I gave up the project, and the space returned to its original wild and dishevelled appearance. When I pass the lane these days, and see it in its current state of neglect, I'm reminded of all the memories I had there when I was younger. Those memories mean a lot to me, and it wouldn't necessarily be apparent to anyone else that this modest lane holds such emotion. It has made me think about other forgotten spaces and overgrown old ruins that hold quiet memories and stories.

The AIDS Memorial Garden is nestled in bushland alongside the Yarra River in Fairfield on the site of a former infectious diseases hospital. The garden first came to my attention in John Foster's 1993 memoir Take Me to Paris, Johnny, which recounts the intriguing life of Foster's partner Juan Cespedes until his death due to an AIDS-related illness. It was described as a rambling 'secret garden' set amongst gum trees and rose bushes, providing quiet repose for AIDS patients and their families. I was interested in visiting the garden, but I wondered what state it would be in or whether it even still existed as the site had since been taken over by a new institution. An old website that documented the garden's history revealed that the bare bones of the garden still remained, but it had otherwise fallen into a state of disrepair.  

On my first visit, I walked for ages through an eerily quiet polytechnic campus in hopeful search of it. I felt as though I was trespassing. When I eventually made it there, I followed a sign that led me into an obscure clearing. There was a dilapidated rotunda that was falling apart, with a wild rose climbing up its side.  Native grasses had grown tall and unruly and rustled in the wind like faint whispers. There are only subtle reminders of the immensity of the garden's history, such as the golden plaques attached to park benches. Each one reads as a dedication to the lives of the hospital's AIDS victims who had their ashes spread in the garden. Another weathered plaque, hidden by foliage, welcomes you into the garden: 'This garden area, a joint project marking the relationship between Fairfield Hospital and the Victorian AIDS Council in caring for people with AIDS, is for the use of all patients and their visitors at Fairfield (April 1988).' The garden's history, and its setting for sombre contemplation, as documented in passages from Foster's book, and also in Timothy Conigrave's 1995 autobiography Holding the Man, seem to be most felt in depths buried amongst overgrown foliage.  It can be felt, too, in the almost-silent shifts of native plants in the breeze.  Whenever I visit the garden I think of all the people I admire who have succumbed to AIDS around the world: Derek Jarman, Arthur Russell, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar,  Conigrave, Foster— just to name a few. Regardless of whether the garden has been forgotten or not, for me, it is loaded with their presence and links together all of their stories; their work and activism.  

A rugged corner of the AIDS Memorial Garden, Fairfield 

Wavelength

I was recently moved by Michael Snow's 1967 structural film Wavelength, which I saw projected in 16mm in a little room to the side of a bar. Wavelength is a film that plays with perception through pushing the boundaries of cinematic space and temporality to transcendental effect. The film represents a single space (a New York City studio loft), with a zoom that gradually lurches across it over a 45 minute duration. A few events partially occur within the frame: furniture is moved, two women listen to the radio, and a man later collapses on the floor. These events never imply an explicit narrative meaning, they're instead markers of particular points of time in the course of the zoom. While the fading in-and-out of daylight through long windows suggests the rapid passing of days within the image, time feels prolonged for the viewer. The zoom is so gradual that we're often held in place and subjected to a static image of the loft. In an essay on the film, Michael Sicinski describes the Wavelength experience as being akin to being in a 'slow moving car.' This sense of slow chronology is occasionally disrupted by the changing of film stock, superimpositions, and coloured filters that are reminiscent of a sunset or an overexposure of light. While space gradually narrows as the zoom moves inwards, it ultimately comes to rest on a photograph of expansive space; the sea, before eventually fading to endless white.  

After the screening I slunk past people drinking in the bar and got some fresh air outside. I ended up walking five kilometres, mulling the experience and readjusting my sense of space as I went along.  Everything felt more expansive and sensual. Within the film's rigid boundaries, I had become conscious of the space I was held within. The rackety sound of passing trams outside and the aromas of perfume and red wine around me had added tangible layers to my experience of the film. I could feel myself becoming consumed by the sensuality of space. The essay by Sicinski provided context to this: 'Wavelength dramatises our bodily location in space, thus bringing to light our spatial existence within the cinema. Wavelength asks us to physically dwell within the cinema.'  

A still from Wavelength taken from towards the beginning of the film

Bricolage

This blog feels like a room with a grey-coloured wall where bits and pieces of writing and images are pinned up like bricolage. 

I never engaged in blogging as a teenager. The only space that I had control over, aside from my bedroom, was the disused dead-end lane behind my family home. For about five years, the lane became a 'gallery' for sculptures that I made from rubbish and detritus gleaned from the neighbourhood, particularly from along the nearby train line. The exhibitions rotated every second week and I ensured that each one focused on a different theme and utilised a different part of the lane. Sometimes objects would hang from the overhanging sheltering branches of an oak tree, other times they'd be dotted around on the ground. Previous works would be dismantled and the materials reused for new sculptures. At the time I wanted to surprise people who walked past and allow them to see the lane in a different light. I don't think it was so much attention seeking borne out of loneliness, as I kept the project completely anonymous, but was simply an opportunity for teenage self expression.

Over the years, I was joined by neighbours who generously contributed bits and pieces to the project. Louise installed some of her geometric paintings on triangle-shaped pieces of wood to the side of a wooden shed that overlooked the lane. Ros pasted up some little etchings of old trees under the canopy of the 100-year-old oak tree. Thinking back to it now, I feel like the project was also a way for me to find company and collaborate with artists and neighbours who I admired. At around the age of 18, I grew out of the project and never returned to it. Although I feel like this blog is an extension of that lane, and perhaps even the longing, that was seeded as a teenager. 

☞www.facebook.com/trianglelane

The Unhomely 

Atiéna R. Kilfa's exhibition 'The Unhomely', which I saw in February at the Camden Art Centre, left a lingering impression on me.  

As I approached the exhibition's main room, I recall feeling unsettled by an eerie drone-like noise. The emanating sound was like the hum of an overworked fan, intensified to make the viewer feel deeply unwelcome. Upon entering the room, the initial sight of electrical cords exposed behind a wall of LED screens, exacerbated the hostile welcome. Having previously been shown at KW in Berlin, I was interested in seeing how the installation would translate to the space at Camden. I was also interested in experiencing how the work would deal with both cinematic and perceptual space through the union of film and installation. Integrated around the LED wall is a wooden stage which elevates and delineates the viewer's movement through the work. Once placed on the stage, you feel compelled to walk across it towards the film on the screen at the other end. 

The film unfolds across one continuous shot in a stairwell where two figures dwell in an unnerving state of tension. It was the uncanny stillness of the man and woman and their avoidance of each other's presence which startled me at first. They appear stilted and somewhat mannequin-like, but then not entirely fake either, which makes their avoidance feel even more strange. Their body language, especially of the woman who rests in a gentle position on the steps, suggests absence and loss. I was given the sense that these two people had been rendered inarticulate by trauma, perhaps inflicted by the stairwell's memory of something horrific. It's unclear whether the memory is recent, or even whether the film itself is located in present time. There are only a few incidental details within the frame that hint at the past, such as the ornate detailing of the stairwell railing and the 1950s-like formal attire of the figures, while the occasional ring of an old landline phone is left ignored. The work seems to deal with overlapping states of time: the frozen state of the figures, the languid time that flows over the course of the film's continuous loop, and the viewer's time as they navigate the work.  

The controlled formal quality of Kilfa's film made me think of Chantal Akerman's work, particularly Jeanne Dielman. Both films force the viewer to feel the flow of time over a long take confined to one domestic space, while showing little details that express tension. In Akerman's film, the tension is fulfilled with a final act of violent revenge at the end of the film. It feels overtly fictive in contrast to the literalness of the domestic scenes which come to define the film. The violence in Kilfa's film never reaches a climax, it's continuous and ongoing: present.   

There was something that compelled me to navigate the work by moving across the stage in time with the camera's movement. It was as though I was the camera itself, attempting to make sense of the tense drama before me. With every step that I took, the loud creaks of the stage's recycled floorboards added further animation to the film's drama. I felt self conscious of drawing attention to my lonely presence within the installation. As a subsequence, I guess the presence of the creaks added another overlapping tension to the film's blurred distinctions between space and time. The 'unhomely' gallery environment made me feel complicit in the violence implied by the film.   

View from stage elevation

Shadows of late autumn

Simplicty 

For her recent Pompidou Centre retrospective, Joanna Hogg has made a new 10 minute film that captures her anxieties and artistic process. The film is shot in Los Angeles, where Hogg has temporarily based herself while devising a new feature film that she intends to be shot there. Hogg films views out of her hotel window during a storm, scans over pages of writing in her notebook, and films her feet as she walks down city streets. She talks about her deep attachment to place; the basis of all of her work, but she doesn't yet know what to point her camera at in this new city. L.A is obviously still revealing itself to her and she's got to find something she finds personal about the city. In her recent The Souvenir films she played with the idea of space as an object of the past by recreating her former flat as a model contained within an empty aircraft hanger. In the Pompidou film, she goes on to mention that hotel rooms easily become 'home' as she gets used to their sounds, smells and spatial qualities. Having recently travelled from city-to-city within Europe and 'set up shop' in different hotel rooms, I understand her attachment. I recall becoming weirdly acquainted with the musty aroma of my basement flat in London... to the point where I now miss it. It's a weird feeling to have to repeatedly sever ties with a 'home' after having had so many personal thoughts and experiences within it. As in her other work, reality and dreams begin to intertwine as Hogg recounts dreams that she's had while in L.A.  These dreams have mysterious links to her concerns regarding the new film and there's the realisation that they could indeed form the basis of the new film.  They're dreams that are now attached to her experience of a new city.  

I really liked this little work from Hogg because it demonstrates that you can make a good film with the simplest of means. All you need is a camera, a sensibility, and some thoughts. And you can make a film about process, rather than something finished and certain with a cling-film gloss around it. The film finishes with Super 8 footage taken from the Pompidou Centre's exterior escalators, possibly taken in the 80s.  We see the tubes and steel details of the Centre's facade: the container of Hogg's retrospective. 

·   

On a different genre, the other night I went to see the British vocal consort The Gesualdo Six perform a concert of Renaissance music as well as contemporary pieces that experimented with old techniques. The controlled polyphony and textures of their voices was so beautifully pure. They reached emotional heights that washed over me like a rich, golden light. It's amazing that the human voice, if highly trained, can reach such a powerful level of beauty and immersion. I found it interesting that you don't need an orchestra of ninety musicians to make an impact. The more stripped back, the better. 

Image I accidentally took while walking along with phone in hand

Winter birds 

As the year moves into the cooler months in Australia, I was reminded of an image of a dead bird that I took on a cold winter's day last year.  I stood below an apple tree and admired a flock of little yellow-winged birds flit between the tree's bare branches.  There was a bitter chill in the air and I recall feeling a sense of emptiness and loss as the birds were the only sign of life I had hitherto had contact with that day.  I then looked to my feet to find a lifeless bird that had been separated from its flock and succumbed to the harshness of winter.

I recently looked at Margaret Tait's 1974 16mm film Aerial and loved the airy way in which she captured the elements of a Scottish winter.  Images include grass blowing in the wind, soil being turned over, and blackbirds flying from a snowy tree branch to Tait's window.  There's a hushed-ness, a sense of looking out at the world from the cosy confines of a living room window, with a fire providing warmth in the background.  The winter meanwhile slogs along through the heavy cover of snow and mud.  Winter's harshness is felt most deeply in an image of a dead bird: one of the birds previously seen at the window.  Its been returned to the earth, its feathers blowing in the wind like blades of grass.  

The birds I came across on that winter's day... in both life and death:

 

 

Paris birds

In the cavernous basement of the hotel I stayed at in Paris recently, I sat facing three tapestries of birds intermingled with flowers and leaves while I had my breakfast.  The hotel was right next to Gare du Nord.  The sound of trains entering and passing through the station were constant.  I heard nothing else but the mechanical sounds of a working city: screeching breaks, whistles, vibrations from the Métro below were dominant.  While I scraped away at my boiled eggs, marmalade toast and sipped my espresso, I was surprised to hear birdsong.  Perhaps my deep concentration on the tapestries had brought the birds to life.  Or perhaps I was just longing to be away from the city, imagining the peace of the countryside.

The tapestries in question

Fraught communication 

The difficulties of language is something that I think about often.  I guess that it's at the forefront of a lot of the writing on here; a kind of self consciousness around feeling as though I'm not a particularly good writer.  Being a visual person, I don't find it easy to bring out what I want to say through words.  I might say one thing, but I really mean another.  I feel that I always miss a beat.  But one must try their best to communicate, because being silent will not get you anywhere in life.  Here's a few things that dance around the idea of communication: 

Physical communication

I was on the Victoria Line.  Two teenaged boys made quite a strong entrance into the carriage by aggressively throwing themselves down onto seats opposite each other.  One boy threw a newspaper at the other boy.  I didn't hear laughter.  I then watched as they communicated to each other through sign language.  There would be an occasional pause as one boy would try to find the right word, while the other waited intently.  At one point, one of them picked up the newspaper, crossed his leg, and pretended to mimic the old English gentleman sitting next to him.  

Semi-extinct languages

Just yesterday, while spending an afternoon in my dear friend Valerie's pottery studio, a woman on holiday from Germany came in to look around.  We got talking about Europe, particularly the difficulties of sharing borders with multiple countries with different political crises and agendas.  She later mentioned that she had just been conducting 'field work' research in Papua New Guinea.  This involved documenting how semi-extinct languages, such as 'Qaqet' (only spoken by 15,000 people) is transmitted.  I found this really interesting, not only because I ashamedly lack awareness of Papua New Guinean culture and history, but because I was struck by the fact that a non-written language can become extinct.  However I was aware that prior to colonisation in Australia, there were over 250 Indigenous languages specific to different clans.  Only 40 of these languages are still spoken today due to the ongoing decimation of Indigenous culture as a result of policies made by settlers.  I read this article from The Conversation that briefly addresses the difficult link between Indigenous language and culture: "we have our culture, a strong culture- but without language, how are you supposed to keep it going?"

A Portrait of Cate Blanchett

I keep returning to a film work by David Rosetzky that I saw in an Australian portraiture exhibition last year.  A Portrait of Cate Blanchett focuses on the actor as she moves through a barren workshop used for the construction of theatre sets at the Sydney Theatre Company.  The setting nicely complements the film's exploration of artistic process and the creation of fiction.  The film begins with a close-up of Blanchett's hands; one hand moulding the other into different gestures.  Although the hands are performing this action, rather than Robert Bresson's imagery of innocent hands devoid of acting, the image from Portrait instantly brought to mind this great Bresson quote: "how many useless and encumbered words disappear when things are expressed with the hand, the head, the shoulders!"  The camera then moves backwards to gradually reveal either in-focus or blurry vision of Blanchett as the digital camera lens is changed.  Blanchett's voiceover begins by exploring the inconsistencies of identity: what is seen and unseen.  She finishes with a comment on interpretation: "I realised that exactly what I thought I was communicating would be received by someone in a completely different way- you can't control it.  You have to give interpretation over."  

In Todd Field's 2022 film TÁR, Blanchett plays a narcissistic conductor, Lydia Tár, who purposefully speaks in a way that eludes clear interpretation.  When discussing music with her orchestra or with peers, she uses ambiguous allegories to describe what she's trying to achieve.  I believe that the character performs in this way in order to alienate and gain the upper hand over people; one of many examples of her narcissistic personality and constant vie for power.  There's a revealing moment in the film's second half where she cries alone while watching her inspiration, Leonard Bernstein talk about music's emotional affects.  It's as though Tár is lamenting the fact that she's spent so much of her life performing a contrived version of herself and never been able to speak directly with an audience.  Bernstein gets to the core of what music achieves without over embellishing his point.  I liked what Bernstein said, so I'll take note of it: "music is the way it makes you feel when you hear it... you don't need to know a lot of stuff about sharps and chords to understand it.  Some of those feelings are so special, so deep that you can't even describe them in words.  We can't always name the things we feel."

A still from A Portrait of Cate Blanchett