Bernadette Mcnulty
Cate Blanchett has often proved her startling versatility as an actress, most memorably playing a young Bob Dylan in the 2007 film, I’m Not There. But nothing prepares you for the dazzling shapeshifting she undergoes in her latest performance.
In Manifesto, the Australian actress is the only person speaking on screen for the entire 90 minutes, playing 13 different characters. All the words are taken from 50 artists’ manifestos that director and artist Julian Rosefeldt stitched together to form the 13 segments. He drew upon the writings of the Futurists, Dadaists, Situationists and Vorticists as well as the treatises of dancers, architects and filmmakers including Jim Jarmusch and Lars Von Trier. Blanchett doesn’t play the artists themselves but rather different characters who speak the words, either as interior monologues, direct speeches or even, in one scene, as a dialogue between a glossy newscaster and a journalist on an outside broadcast being lashed with rain.
Her physical transformations are dazzling. One minute she is a dirty, bearded vagrant, pulling a shopping trolley through an abandoned industrial wasteland and railing against the elements in a growling Scottish accent, the next she is a hard-nosed City trader. She is a darkhaired, tattooed punk, a blonde, cardigan-wearing housewife, a primary school teacher, a scientist, a funeral speaker and a puppeteer.
Rosefeldt laughs when I say the make-up artist deserves at least some of the credit for working her magic. “Oh my God yes,” he says, “Morag Ross did an incredible job.”
Rosefeldt and Blanchett first met seven years ago in Berlin when Blanchett went to an opening of his work at a gallery. Rosefeldt had just seen Blanchett play Dylan and the two started talking about making a film together, but it took Rosefeldt another three years before he hit upon the theme of using artists’ writings as the basis of a new work. He came across the writings of the French Futurist poet and choreographer Valentine de Saint-point and, struck by the beauty and power of her words, realised he had come across his theme.
“Artists’ manifestos are something that are usually only read by art historians and students,” he says. “They are seen as very dry and academic, and not always integral to the work that was produced. They are seen as an adjunct. But I wanted to bring them to the centre.”
Manifesto was originally planned as an art installation, but by turning it into a film Rosefeldt wants it to reach a wider audience. “When people see something within the white cube of a gallery they see it in a certain way. It speaks only to the small group of people who are already interested in that subject. They are an elite, already educated in the way to see something. But by taking it into the black boxes of cinema, it makes it more democratic. It opens it up to other interpretations.” ■