THE 2022 FILM Tár has an unconventional beginning: immediately after the title card, credits roll. Not just the credits for the lead actors and director—a full three minutes of credits that includes everyone who worked on the film. While typical for a film made before 1970, full opening credits are all but unheard of in cinema today. What is more, the credits appear in reverse order: first the acknowledgements, then the visual effects crew and asset editors, the location scouts, the caterer, the assistant directors, the gaffers, the stylists, and so on until finally, the last credit, writer and director Todd Field. When asked about this decision by the LA Times, Field said:

For Field, putting the credits at the top of Tár in reverse order was a way of acknowledging the work of the hundreds of people it takes to make a successful feature film. Only a select few of those people will ever be household names—the director and lead actors, maybe, but few in the moviegoing public will recognize the best boy or key grip or even know what their work entails. Auteur theory thrives in popular film rhetoric; how fitting, then, for a film about a genius composer’s fall from grace, one that meditates on the cult of genius in art and society, to flip the credits on their head.

Many hands make a film, and much of the labour of filmmaking goes unseen—so too with scholarship.