Man­i­festo

This mul­ti-screen art instal­la­tion, now con­densed into a sin­gle 90-minute fea­ture, is an utter­ly sin­gu­lar expe­ri­ence. Julian Rosefeldt’s Man­i­festo sees Cate Blanchett star as 13 dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters who deliv­er 13 dif­fer­ent mono­logues, each one derived from artis­tic man­i­festos through­out his­to­ry. Struc­tured as a series of inter­cut vignettes, the film dwells on the ques­tion of what con­sti­tutes art, and the extent to which it can ever be sep­a­rat­ed from oth­er aspects of mod­ern life.

With Man­i­festo, then, writer/​director Rose­feldt is deal­ing with big ideas and abstract con­cepts, but he does so with a reas­sur­ing sense of wit. He trans­mits the feel­ing that his film is aware of its own light absur­di­ty, which pre­vents it from slip­ping into the con­ceit­ed crevasse in which such a weight­i­ly con­cep­tu­al project could reside. One sequence set in a tele­vi­sion stu­dio plays out like a far­ci­cal par­o­dy of broad­cast news, with Blanchett essay­ing car­i­ca­tures of a glam­orous anchor and a rain drenched correspondent.

Indeed, the pow­er of Blanchett’s performance(s) is per­pet­u­al­ly cap­ti­vat­ing, even when her mono­logues veer into the eso­teric. The film’s char­ac­ters allow her the scope to ful­ly tap in to her aston­ish­ing range, cov­er­ing every­thing from a qui­et­ly nuanced house­wife to a delight­ful­ly over-insis­tent male vagrant. She breathes life into lec­tures which might oth­er­wise feel ver­bose and inaccessible.

Although the film is open to any num­ber of read­ings, the most obvi­ous is as an exam­i­na­tion of the rela­tion­ship between art and the wider human
expe­ri­ence. Each of the inter­cut scenes pro­vide a snap­shot of life – an office, a fam­i­ly din­ner, a dance rehearsal – and, by plac­ing the man­i­festos against mun­dane back­drops, the film chal­lenges the view­er to relate the­o­ry to expe­ri­ence. Slow­ly, the con­struc­tions of every­day life begin to appear as con­trived and affect­ed, as if life is a con­cep­tu­al per­for­mance piece. ​“All art is fake”, pro­claims the open­ing title card, and the ques­tion of authen­tic­i­ty and orig­i­nal­i­ty runs through­out the movie.

In deriv­ing an art film pure­ly from exam­ples of artis­tic the­o­ry, Rose­feldt has turned the exist­ing rela­tion­ship between the two on its head. Analy­sis that is writ­ten in response to art has become the sub­ject of art itself, eras­ing the invis­i­ble bar­ri­er that exists between the two dis­ci­plines. It’s an inter­est­ing notion that might not have much cin­e­mat­ic clout were it not for Blanchett’s pres­ence, which helps to pro­vide a soul­ful anchor for an oth­er­wise obscure top­ic. Indeed, it is not with­out irony that one of the fea­tured man­i­festos focus­es on the inac­ces­si­bil­i­ty of con­cep­tu­al art.

Man­i­festo is a film that wills you to indulge in its own meta­phys­i­cal abstrac­tion, wear­ing its ambi­gu­i­ty proud­ly on its sleeve. By its very nature, the film offers few ideas of its own, but it does invite audi­ences to con­sid­er a range of exist­ing (and often con­tra­dic­to­ry) per­spec­tives with­in a new, Blanchett-enthused pack­age. It might not make for an after­noon of light enter­tain­ment, but it’s still an enthralling men­tal exer­cise and a vehi­cle for one of the screen’s most charis­mat­ic and chameleon-like stars.