Review: Starring Cate Blanchett, 13 times over: Actress commands a stunning range of roles for ‘Manifesto’

The subject of “Manifesto,” a new film by German artist Julian Rosefeldt, is as much Cate Blanchett, its star, as it is the radical manifestos by more than 50 Futurists, Dadaists, Suprematists, Conceptual artists and others that anchor the movie’s 13 vignettes.

Blanchett assumes the guise of a different character to perform each one. Her conviction and persuasiveness in fabricating fictional identities from scratch informs the individual texts. Rosefeldt crosses documentary and theatrical forms, bringing to life words mostly by 20th century artists.

For artists, a manifesto is not merely a declaration of intent. It is central to the creation of an identity. A world that excludes the artist’s values is ascertained and described, while a new world that includes and engages them is not merely proposed but insisted upon. Manifestos demand.

“I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero,” Claes Oldenburg wrote in 1961. As the words are spoken, Blanchett, decked out as a tightly coiled, upper-middle-class mom calling her tow-headed family to a precisely orchestrated Sunday dinner, seems poised to shatter like untempered glass.

The specific relationship between this domestic vignette and Oldenburg’s Pop art text is unclear. Perhaps that ambiguity is because the artist has always denied that “I Am For …” is indeed a manifesto. He calls it a satire. In poetic language, he goes about tearing down the era’s lofty critical demand for abstraction as art’s theoretically highest value, replacing it with a matter-of-fact catalog of everyday ephemera.

Among the 95-minute film’s more convincing hybrids of image and text is the startling collision afforded by Tristan Tzara’s 1918 Dada manifesto. Blanchett, chicly attired, declares: “I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way, if he knows the joy that rises like arrows to the astral layers, or that other joy that goes down into the mines of corpse-flowers and fertile spasms.”

She delivers this beleaguered, post-World War I shriek of worn-out horror as a graveside eulogy. A shell-shocked throng, arrayed in black as a classical frieze like “A Burial at Ornans,” Courbet’s epic 1850 painting of a provincial funeral, awaits the lowering of a flower-bedecked casket into the earth.

Originally presented at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image two years ago, “Manifesto” was shown on 13 individual screens suspended in space. A viewer could move among them, the fractured person known as “Cate Blanchett” happening all at once.

Now, projected on a single screen at the Nuart Theatre starting Friday — the work loses that edge. Reassembled into a linear film (about 30 minutes have been cut), “Manifesto” retains control of sequence and time. Rosefeldt attempts to inject a bit of the old break-up by intercutting among a few vignettes, but the effort feels perfunctory.

The loss isn’t debilitating, however, which is one measure of Blanchett’s power as an actor. She slips into the jarringly disjunctive roles of stockbroker, garbage worker, corporate CEO, punk, scientist, puppeteer, choreographer, TV news reader and teacher, as well as the aforementioned Mom and eulogist.

The film opens and closes with her transformation into a grimy homeless man. His vagrancy, adrift in the chill ruins of a bleak industrial landscape, presents a rootless person without a known identity.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, independent manifestos replaced the rules formulated by state-run art academies. The possibility for movement away from society’s assigned roles made them a staple for art. With skill and erudition, Rosefeldt’s film surveys the aftermath.

Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A. Opens Friday. (310) 473-8530, www.landmarktheatres.com.

christopher.knight@latimes.com

Twitter: @KnightLAT

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