Being Cate
Cate Blanchett takes many different roads in Manifesto
‘Cate is very good at letting you feel at ease,” director Julian Rosefeldt said, sitting alongside t wotime Oscar winner Cate Blanchett. “You meet her and, of course, at first you don’t meet a woman or Cate Blanchett, you meet all the characters she’s interpreted in her career as an actress. That can be intimidating, but then, just a few hours later, you start to really go into it and ask each other questions.”
The German director turned to the Australian actress and looked her in the eye. Blanchett, who will turn 48 on May 14, smiled back.
“You are so curious, so very much an artist, and I think more than just an actor, which is already great,” he said as she listened intently. “This made it so easy to collaborate, and we just had a lot of questions to each other all the time, nonstop. Even during the shooting of each and every scene, we wanted to know more about what we were doing. If you don’t stop being curious, you can really go far.”
Blanchett goes very far — and very far out, too — for Rosefeldt in their daring new film, Manifesto. The chameleonic Blanchett — who won Oscars for Best Supporting Actress for The Aviator (2004) and as Best Actress for Blue Jasmine (2014) — plays 13 different characters. She assumes wildly different looks and accents to embody a slick Wall Street broker, a bitter punk, a black-veiled funeral speaker, a conservative mom with her husband and kids, a news anchorwoman and a reporter, and a ranting homeless man, among others.
Each character recites genuine manifestos, most having to do with the world of art, touching on everything from situationism, architecture, stridentism/creationism and Dadaism to pop art, surrealism/spatialism, vortism/blue rider/expressionism and fluxus/merz/performance. Among those quoted are Guillaume Apollinaire, Werner Herzog, Vicente Huidobro, Jim Jarmusch, Sol LeWitt, Karl Marx, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Olga Rozanova, Lars Von Trier and many more.
Manifesto began life as a multi-screen art installation, with the individual vignettes appearing on separate screens and taking roughly two hours to view in their entirety. For the film version, Rosefeldt edited the footage down to 95 minutes, which for the most part play out one after the other, though several are broken up across the film’s running time.
When she first became involved with Manifesto in 2014, Blanchett thought she was making an installation. Now here she was, nearly three years later, doing press interviews at a boutique Manhattan hotel on behalf of the cinematic iteration, which will open in limited release on May 23. She looked stylish with her hair short, straight and blond, and sported a pastel-pink dress as she joined Rosefeldt to speak with a quintet of journalists.
“It was definitely an installation,” she said. “It was a 13-channel work that the audience can self-direct … At first I must have been a little bit sceptical of the functional decision of having to make a linear version. When Julian showed it to me, I could see that it had a need to exist in and of itself, and it’s a very different experience.
“Also, I think it’s a provocation in and of itself to an audience used to dealing with a narrative, with a first, second and third act,” she continued. “When you see a movie in the cinema, you automatically search for a certain type of meaning. This really subverts that experience.
“One film I was influenced by visually was Koyaanisqatsi [1982],” Blanchett added, “and this is different, but it’s an experience like that. You have to give over the need to make sense, which is ironic given how much intellectual rigour and application there is to not only the way that Julian’s made the work, but to the manifestos themselves.”
Heading into Manifesto, Blanchett and Rosefeldt prepped passionately, because there was little time or money to shoot the vignettes. It also meant that Blanchett had to absorb and then distance herself from each manifesto with very little time to switch gears. Discussing the process, she once again revealed her ambivalence about who, or what, exactly she was portraying.
“Having encountered the manifestos — and not all of them, because a lot of them were new to me — when I was studying art history at university, I’d had an intellectual, historical response to those, and I expected that to be reignited,” she said. “But, given that I was having to make them manifest, to physically manifest the manifestos, the response I had was completely non-intellectual. It was energetic. It was physical. So I very much saw them not as being characters necessarily …
“And this wasn’t a decision I made,” she said. “It was just something that evolved, because it was more about what they did. What was the situation they were in? Because, often, the way the manifesto was delivered worked in a contrapuntal way to the actual meaning of the manifesto.
“So the context was completely subverted,” Blanchett continued. “You were saying something as dialogue that was either nonsensical or completely out of context, and would never be said as dialogue. I didn’t have an intellectual response to it at all. It was a very intuitive, physical response.”
One vignette proved quite personal, but for a surprising reason. In that sequence a prim and proper, conservative mother addresses her husband and three young sons at the dinner table. Blanchett’s real-life husband, playwright Andrew Upton, and their sons Dashiell, Roman and Ignatius play the roles.
“They’re so sweet,” Blanchett said proudly. “I was on a family odyssey through Europe with my extended family, so they were in Berlin at the time, and a couple days before, Julian said, ‘Do you think Andrew and the three boys would be up for being in it?’. “I asked them, and I thought, [since] it’s in a museum context, it would be fine, it’s very safe,” she said. “We do try to quarantine them from that, but they were great. They were really good sports, and we probably couldn’t have done it any other way, actually.”
Blanchett deliberated for a moment when asked if one manifesto or character resonated with her above the others.
“I think one of the greatest, most provocative sentences in the entire thing, for me, is written by a female [Mierle Laderman Ukeles], saying, ‘After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’,” she replied. “I relished playing the news reader and [reporter]. I love doubling, and the whole thing is an act of doubling.
“What resonated, or what I found most compelling, was these assertions of artistic individuality,” Blanchett said, “but yet there’s so many points of connection between them, which, given the political polemic at the moment, is interesting. It’s very easy to divide and destroy, but how do you actually connect? Artists are very good at connecting things.”
No one will mistake Manifesto for a conventional Hollywood film, but that was no deterrent to Blanchett, who always has mixed it up, starring in Hollywood films and indies alike, working with established filmmakers and with rookies, and finding time to act on stage as well.
In early May she was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the Broadway drama The Present, which in 2015 she’d headlined in Australia. She’ll renew her blockbuster credentials with the upcoming films Thor: Ragnarok and Ocean’s Eight, but also has committed to star in a West End production of All About Eve in early 2018.
“I get very restless and I get bored with myself every second of the day, the sound of my own voice, my physical limitations,” the actress explained.
“It’s always the surprise that I’m drawn toward. I think, if you want to keep growing as an artist, as an actor, whatever you want to call yourself, whatever you get called, you have to keep risking failure.
“So you have to bite off more than you can chew, and this was certainly that,” she said.
“I’m also excited when you can speak to different types of audiences. The idea that children get offered through their education an art experience, and they might encounter this and they might never have heard of a manifesto before — that’s what public art galleries should be, and why there’s got to be greater access to those places and why film festivals are so important, because films like this can hopefully find an audience, albeit small.” Blanchett turned to Rosefeldt.
“To be in dialogue with someone like Julian is really exciting,” she said, “because your frame of reference is so interesting and the questions you ask and your ability to see ... You’re so open, but I really admire how clear your eye is. I find that inspiring to be around.
“So the process is as interesting as the outcome,” Blanchett concluded. “You’re not necessarily outcome-focused, which sometimes you can feel in a film because of how much money they’re spending, as they should be.
“I think, often, when you have financial limitations, you can be incredibly creative, because, by nature of the restrictions, you have to take risks.”