Manifesto (Julian Rosefeldt, 2017)

[bottled spider]

Manifesto (Julian Rosefeldt)
A feast for those who thought Blanchett the best thing about I'm Not There: All Cate Blanchett All The Time reading aloud in various personas -- and here's the really exciting bit -- excerpts from art manifestos. Hilariously satirical and sincerely poetic by turns, but always strange. Very strange. Highly recommended.

[domino harvey]

Wish I could have seen it as an art installation. Apparently there's a synchronized moment during all of the competing monologues where they match up at the exact same time that's supposed to be quite impactful

[bottled spider]

The film ends with a sort of fugue of all the scenes using split-screen, and it does sort of synchronize into a unified chord.

I'm glad I caught this in the theatre. Home viewing, on the other hand, will have the advantage of being able to browse back and forth among the manifestos.

[zedz]

I found this film somewhat disappointing. Great concept, and Blanchett is game as anything taking it on, but I felt like the material defeated the film, as, despite the desperate variety of all the different characters and settings, the language of the various manifestos was incredibly samey, and ended up creating a conceptual mush. When the Dogme Manifesto came along towards the end (in perhaps the film's funniest sequence) it was surprisingly refreshing because it was so practical and specific, and thus stood in contrast to the vague pomposity of so much of the rest of the film's language.

I expect that's another aspect of the film that would have been better served experiencing it as a simultaneous installation than a linear slog.

The film is, however, a brilliant architectural showcase. The location scout did an amazing job!

[bottled spider]

Agreed that the locations were amazing, definitely one of the film's strengths.

I too found the film a slog at times, but was all the same blown away by its weird cumulative effect.

There's something inherently silly about writing art manifestos at all. The monotonous and virtually interchangeable declarations of originality were, I suppose, an intentional irony. For better or worse, bland texts may have suited Rosefeldt's purposes (which seem not to be illustration or exposition) -- like a chef playing around with creative ways to dress up tofu. Having said that, a few of the manifestos were beautiful and interesting in their own right.

Favourite scene: the puppet dolls!

[domino harvey]

I found this disappointing too, and the reality of it was a lot different than how I had pictured it. I got very little sense that Rosefeldt understood or tried to engage most of these manifestos on any level beyond surface irony (if even that half the time) and so what most of these segments amounted to were nice-looking noise, with Blanchett spouting off lines disconnected from her behavior or actions in any practical way like one of those bad modern Shakespeare updates that keep the language but seem spoken by those who have no idea of their meaning. Add to that the decision when editing these individual pieces into a whole to chop up, edit, and/or intercut at least half of the segments and this has a lot of net negatives working against it. I thought a grand total of two of the thirteen Manifesto Blanchetts did anything with this premise, and they're inexplicably the last two as presented in the feature version: the newscaster and on-the-scene reporter Blanchetts exchanging without coherent relevant intonation the words of the Conceptual Art and Minimalism movements at least provided an internal commentary on the disconnect present throughout the film thus far; and of course Teacher Blanchett correcting Dogme 95 mistakes in classwork and telling her third grade students to "Remember the words of Jean-Luc Godard" while scribbling his quote on a SmartBoard is actually funny, but also telling advice Rosefeldt doesn't take... Godard too has many scenes of characters reading long texts they don't seem to understand. Of course, Godard didn't build an entire film solely around that one idea... and he's already done it, many times over... and the texts he chose are often rich in meaning and contrast/enrichment to the action. What richness is there here in cheap jokes like a family prayer turned into a defense of Pop Art, or non-starting parallels like a stock broker talking about Futurism? I think that this film is indeed prettily filmed and full of architectural and location wows isn't a plus, but a further indication that this project is so insecure in the words it has Blanchett blurt out that it can't even build anywhere but around, apart, or away from them...

And of course I just missed this in the installation version at the Hirshhorn!

[zedz]

Since I saw the film, I have seen the installation, and it works much, much better in that format. You can drift around and take in as much or as little of each manifesto as you like, which provides a much more natural form of "editing" than the weirdly neutral / random format of the film. And the moments of synchronicity are actually quite magnificent, as the murmuring babble of the gallery briefly resolves into unity, then trails off again into babble. There's the one big moment when all the voices come together, which is the showpiece, but there are also smaller moments when two or three, or five screens unite within the larger babble to surprisingly moving effect. The simultaneous presentation also levels out the inconsistency of successful / unsuccessful settings and compelling / boring texts that drags the film down.

So, definitely try to catch the installation even if you didn't especially like the film. It's clearly the primary format of this project, with the film a secondary and much lesser form of documentation.

[domino harvey]

It kills me that I was in DC with time to kill a half dozen times in the six months this was playing in the museum and I didn’t know! Even with my criticisms, I will def take your advice to see it again in the installation format if the opportunity arises again, if for no other reason than to actually see it in its intended state to weigh whether the flaws in its feature form remain flaws in installation

[zedz]

I expect there are native flaws to the entire concept, as I discussed above. Much of the base material is vague and samey in a way that the treatment tries to disguise, rather than acknowledge and explore. But that's a quality that's laid bare in the linear filmic treatment and is conveniently disguised in the installation. I might not have even noticed it in the installation, unless I had slavishly consumed every video in its entirety before moving onto the next (i.e. tried to turn the simultaneous gallery experience into a linear filmic one through sheer bloody-mindedness!)

Also, and somewhat related, the use of artistic manifestos has a different resonance in an art gallery than in a cinema, where the textual material could just as easily have been Shakespeare soliloquies, or online reviews of children's toys, without much change in impact.

The other thing the installation had in its favour was a grander sense of scale. You can get closer to the screen and can (obviously) change the size of each screen through physical movement. Part of the power of the simultaneous moments is that they're delivered in close-up, so you receive them as as roomsful of giant Cate Blanchetts staring directly at you. It just doesn't have anything like the same impact as sequential montage or worse, little visual tiles.