Watch Cate Blanchett play 13 char­ac­ters in the Man­i­festo trailer

James McAvoy may have tak­en on the size­able task of play­ing mul­ti­ple roles in the upcom­ing thriller, Split, about a man suf­fer­ing from dis­so­cia­tive per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der, but the first trail­er for Man­i­festo, which is receiv­ing its inter­na­tion­al pre­miere at this year’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val, offers an aston­ish­ing glimpse of the 13(!) char­ac­ters that Cate Blanchett por­trays in the film.

Blanchett has long been her­ald­ed for her range and ver­sa­til­i­ty as an actor, par­tic­u­lar­ly her turn as a Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. This ambi­tious and unique sound­ing project by Ger­man artist Julian Rose­feldt looks like the per­fect plat­form for her tal­ents. The trail­er shows us brief flash­es of Blanchett as a home­less man, a news anchor, a teacher, a con­struc­tion work­er, a sci­en­tist and a seedy drunk­ard to name just some of her characters.

Man­i­festo start­ed out as a mul­ti­screen video instal­la­tion, first exhib­it­ed at the Aus­tralian Cen­tre for the Mov­ing Image, Mel­bourne back in 2015, before addi­tion­al screen­ings in Berlin and New York last year. Now Rose­feldt is releas­ing his project as a sin­gle 90-minute fea­ture, described on his web­site as ​“a series of strik­ing mono­logues […] cre­at­ed by edit­ing and reassem­bling a col­lage of artists’ man­i­festos, from dec­la­ra­tions penned by the Futur­ists, Dadaists and Sit­u­a­tion­ists, to the mus­ings of indi­vid­ual artists, archi­tects, dancers and film­mak­ers such as Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rain­er and Jim Jarmusch.”

By hav­ing Blanchett recite these man­i­festos via 13 very dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters, Rose­feldt seeks to recon­tex­tu­alise these abstract ideas with­in the every­day world. In doing so, he seems inter­est­ed in chal­leng­ing the notion that art can often be inac­ces­si­ble and alien­at­ing by re-empha­sis­ing the far-reach­ing impact that artis­tic vision­ar­ies have on all mem­bers of soci­ety. It remains to be seen whether Man­i­festo works as a coher­ent nar­ra­tive fea­ture, but one thing we’re sure of is that it will boast 13 stun­ning lead per­for­mances. Blanchett fans couldn’t ask for much more.

Man­i­festo is released 24 November.

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