For his latest work, “Manifesto”, German auteur Julian Rosefeldt has teamed up with Cate Blanchett to create a funny and subversive homage to statements of aesthetic intent – a genre of writing dominated by art bros. In this flick, Blanchett is transformed into 12 different characters, including a sneering rock star in a dingy rehearsal space, a homeless man with a megaphone and a news reporter who can’t stop blinking. Renowned for his fastidious attention to detail, Rosefeldt creates opulent, surreal films, and this current project doesn’t disappoint. Prior to its launch at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum during the Berlinale, Rosefeldt sat down to discuss his new film and the gendered history of these artist declarations.
What inspired you to create “Manifesto”?
I developed an interest in these declarations artists often like to make while working on “Deep Gold” in 2013. That film was a tribute to Luis Buñuel’s “L’Age d’Or”, which was quite a feminist film, and caused me to do a bit of background reading, through which I discovered two pamphlets by the French futurist Valentine Saint-Point. Around the same time I met Cate Blanchett, and we struck on the idea of doing something together. She said, ‘If you ever need me, let me know.’ This was in my head as I was researching other art manifestos, where I found that combinations of texts from different eras worked together. For example, despite being written nearly 40 years apart, those by Kandinsky and Barnett Newman complemented one another perfectly. So with all this in mind I began writing the scenes for a woman using them.
Why?
Well, the majority of these texts were written by young men early on in their careers. These guys didn’t just want to change the art world, but were trying to find their place in society, too. ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where am I?’ ‘What do I want from life?’ These are the sorts of questions they asked. And these are seemingly always the sorts of questions young men ask themselves during that phase of their life. So I thought it would be interesting to have these very masculine texts read by a woman.
What was it like working with Cate Blanchett?
She’s very clever, and naturally she had her own interpretations of the texts. She also brought in her experiences and knowledge of people. Everyday we filmed a different character, sometimes two in the same day. For example, she did the homeless man and the CNN reporter in the same shoot. She was there for six hours on her own in a mask. And both characters are completely different – one’s Scottish, and the other’s from Texas. You can’t do this with every actor.
How did you choose which manifestos to use and how to present them?
They were partially chosen by intuition, but there were obvious choices for the way in they were arranged. For the Futurism scene, which is played out in a stock exchange, we did things by analogy. Other scenes refer to the text as it’s spoken, such as the Minimalist scene, where Cate interviews herself about conceptual art.
And finally, have you ever written a manifesto?
I may have written one in my early twenties.
Manifesto runs until 10 July 2016 at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin.
Portrait by David Von Becker
Taken from Sleek issue #49, available for purchase on our online shop now