A conservative mother leads her family in a lunchtime prayer on pop art. A tattooed punk screams about stridentism at a roomful of drugged-out partiers. A teacher stifles her students’ creativity with the harsh dictates of the Dogme 95 movement. Cate Blanchett, the preternatural shape-shifter who can slink into Bob Dylan or Katherine Hepburn with equal ease, embodies these and nine other souls in Manifesto, the art installation turned feature film from Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto premiered in 2015 as a 13-screen sensory wonder at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The installation asks viewers to move from screen to […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on May 9, 2017During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? Manifesto was originally planned as a 13-screen installation for the art context, so it is touring museums and art festivals now. But I also got some funding from a German TV channel and I needed to consider how to bring that multi-screen-concept later into a linear version. Given the fact that we only had 11 days to shoot with Cate, the entire project, running in my mind parallel […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 23, 2017Throughout December, perhaps the best film showing in New York wasn’t in a theater at all but in a Civil War-era equine drill hall. Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, a multiscreen installation starring Cate Blanchett in twelve different roles, closed its stay at the Park Avenue Armory last week. A single-screen linear version will reach a broader audience at Sundance next week, prompting me to reflect on the (presumed) differences between the two versions and what video artists and filmmakers of all stripes can learn from Rosefeldt’s latest work. First, a description. Manifesto takes its title and its text from the written manifestos of artists […]
by Randy Astle on Jan 12, 2017