Manifesto review: 13 different Cate Blanchetts all have something to say

Julian Rosefeldt's art installation turned feature film is a challenging, but rewarding work

A film birthed out of an art installation, Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto project has been given second life. Originally projected concurrently on 13 different screens at galleries around the world, it now exists as a complete feature film, each vignette carefully sown together into a linear viewing experience. Manifesto is a work that sets out a fairly simple premise: a collage of manifestos, political and artistic, delivered each by Cate Blanchett in 13 different guises.

Blanchett’s presence in itself, of course, would justify any artwork that might spring into existence and, certainly, Manifesto invokes immediate awe merely in the span of her talent. From tattooed punk to homeless man, she moulds herself, fluid like liquid iron settling into its mould. In the sudden cut between characters, we can see her craft flourish: the shift in voice, pose, and mannerisms. We’re reminded that she’s truly peerless in her scope.

That said, the true magic of Blanchett’s work here is an immersion into each character so complete that, despite occupying the screen for almost every minute of the film, the end result doesn’t feel like some audacious thespian exercise. Blanchett allows herself to become a tool for storytelling; a blank, endlessly malleable canvas upon which any idea can be faithfully projected.

All that’s happening, essentially, is that these extracts of great scribes – Communism, Futurism, Surrealism – are now presented in non-artistic contexts. A tearful speaker at a funeral recites Francis Picabia’s Manifeste Cannibale Dada: “One dies a hero’s death or an idiot’s death – which comes to the same thing.” When she breaches Louis Aragon’s Dada Manifesto, there are tears in her eyes: “No more anything, no more anything, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

To note, Manifesto illuminates little about these individual movements. Their presentation is odd, confrontational, occasionally patience-testing, and often dryly humorous. A news anchor debates conceptual art with her field reporter (both, of course, are played by Blanchett), and a conservative housewife conducts a dinner table prayer for “an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum”, as per Claes Oldenburg’s I Am for an Art.

What Manifesto does achieve, seemingly, is to crash together the planes of art and life. It states, in itself, that we are all the creators of manifestos, that the very act of living is a declaration of belief and intent, whether in the lectures of a schoolteacher or the mutterings of a homeless man.

It’s a process of demythologisation, almost; manifestos are, inevitably, lofty in their language. Occasionally, it sounds like these artists are offering their visions, and their visions only, as the sole saviours of culture and mankind.

Seeing them collected together, however, and thrust into so many different hands, we start to understand their patterns. Constantly, we hear an imperative to “destroy the cult of the past”, that culture, as it stands, is insufficient; each manifesto leans on iconoclasm as a path to revolution.

Yet, when thrust into the hands of a woman waking early to a desolate morning, bidding her daughter goodbye before biking her way to her job at a garbage incineration plant, Bruno Taut’s words of “everlasting change” take on new meaning. A manifesto is a signal to hope.

Manifesto hits UK cinemas 24 November.

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