Here’s Cate Blanchett as Her 13 Characters in ‘Manifesto’

By Moze Halperin

Dec. 6, 2016

It feels like someone infiltrated a collective gay cinephile dream (or, fine, if not collective, mine), in which one simply gets to see Cate Blanchett wear an entire wig shop and embody a variety of characters with trademark technical exaction, independent of something as trifling as plot. Because, now, a series of full images from a fragmentary film project called Manifesto has been shared by Sundance, in advance of its just-announced screening at the festival, where it’ll take on a new life/format — and, indeed, we get to see Blanchett wearing all the wigs.

Manifesto is a series of short films by German video artist Julian Rosefeldt, and was initially screened as an installation across multiple screens, first at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image — but it’ll actually be on view at New York’s Park Avenue Armory starting tomorrow and ending January 8, before it’s seen at Sundance, which takes place from January 19-29. Park Avenue Armory’s website describes it as “a collage of artistic declarations from the past century reinterpreted as poetic monologues to provoke timeless questions about the gendered, social, and political contexts that shape the artist’s role in society,” with 13 scenes/characters in total, which pull from over 50 creative manifestos and connect “these famous texts to the humanity of everyday characters.”

The project is being reformatted as a 90-minute feature that all fits onto one screen, and will be seen as such in a Sundance “world premiere.” Per Indiewire, the movements/artists whose manifestos Manifesto makes manifest include those of Dadaists, Futurists, Pop Artists, Fluxus, Jim Jarmusch, Lars Von Trier, and many more.

Here are some of the images:

Check it out in installation form, courtesy of the Park Avenue Armory:

Installation of Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto at Park Avenue Armory. Photo by James Ewing