Manifesto

November 9, 2018

Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.

Manifesto, directed by Julian Rosefeldt, disorients the viewer. Locations change without warning, as do characters. The speaker is a sometimes character and sometimes narrator. So many things happen simultaneously that it would be difficult to express them all. I will wander through a few of the things that caught my attention, though I am, unhappily, missing the majority.

The precision of this movie astounds me. As an introduction to the puppeteer, for example, the camera begins with an aerial view of the puppeteer working on a puppet that we soon come to meet quite closely. The viewer is yet unaware of this puppet’s meaning. It is only as the puppeteer rises from the desk and leaves the scene that the viewer is introduced to the the rest of the room. As the camera slowly pans across a small, brick room filled with puppets, we begin to recognize famous or historical figures. Some wear shocked expressions, some bored, some guilty, some blank. Sirens and street noise sound in the background. The collection includes figures such as Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Hitler, and the Planet of the Apes. My favorite is Marilyn Monroe, who lies face-up on a dingy, toy sofa with a man’s hand suggestively patting her exposed knee. The expressions on these two linked figures do not correspond to each other. Marilyn Monroe looks pained, while the man smiles joyfully. This quick snippet implies significant action. Small details such as this connect the viewer to the image in a way that creates life. Furthermore, the room contains such a dense amount of history, that the viewer is bound to connect with the overwhelming feeling of the passage of time. As with all the other scenes in Manifesto, Rosefeldt overloads the scene with sensory information. Therefore, by the time the camera returns to the puppeteer, the viewer has formed an emotional attachment to the puppets. (Emotional regard in any sense forms an attachment.)

Rosefeldt excels at a minimalism that forms some emotional bond between viewer and screen. This perplexes me, particularly in this scene with the puppeteer, whose hands we see and whose voice we hear, and yet we have no real knowledge of this figure outside of the hundreds of dolls placed about the room. The things I know about the puppeteer: the person is intense, passionate, exacting, precise, and interested in history or characters. The viewer is reasonably startled, then, to find the puppeteer pinning a wig onto their very own puppet. This most startling event astonishes us because, in my mind, the puppets have become hyper-real. They express emotion, and therefore, they must themselves convey some sort of “real” emotion. They are the placeholders of our emotion, and to see (and hear!) their creation is grotesque and surreal. Moreover, this particular puppet enters creation only once hair has been added. This grants an identity. Now the viewer connects with the puppet by labeling it. Therefore, the viewers themselves restrict the doll’s freedom. This is, of course, the intended effect. These hyper-real puppets exist in this box-style room, piled on top of each other in some sort of eternal limbo for the voyeurs’ eyes. They represent an act of creation, but the viewer agonizes over their apparent lifelessness coupled with their inability to die.

This reinforces the larger narrative in Rosefeldt’s film: that a manifesto is born out of a particular moment. It explosively responds to specific cultural content. What, then, is the next generation to do with it? What is the viewer, who likely feels no connection to the particular character of a movement, to do with the incongruities and absurdities presented by a manifesto’s anger? Is the manifesto to be shelved among others, dismissed from its specific argument, but unable to die? Should it be removed from view altogether? However, if we dismiss the manifesto as completely irrelevant, then perhaps we overlook some important cultural revelations.

Rosefeldt masterfully incorporates incongruous images. Cate Blanchett brilliantly plays all of the characters and delivers all of the manifestos. In each scene, she also slips into a monologue, delivered in a different pitch from the character’s voice. She plays both men and women, young and old. She plays rebellious, ridiculous, hallucinating, strict, poor, wealthy and conservative characters. She incorporates accents and body language. Meanwhile, Rosefeldt pays particular attention to sound and image. Each scene offers some startling revelation, such as we saw and heard with the pinning of the puppet’s hair.

Irony rules this movie. I offer a few examples of scenes which struck me, though there are many to speak of. First, I found the CEO at a fancy party particularly ridiculous. We meet them at a beautiful house, located along a gorgeous body of water, during a cocktail party. The horizon dominates the viewer’s gaze. While the viewer contemplates the horizon and natural beauty, however, the party-goers never even glance in the direction of the water. Furthermore, they discuss beauty in such abstracted, idealistic and theoretical terms as to make it unobservable. They literally miss the point. In another scene, a woman rises to a podium above a gravesite to give a speech of mourning. Instead, she desecrates the body and offends emotion. Standing over the corpse, she claims that “to sit still is to risk one’s life” and that “one dies as an idiot or a hero, it’s all the same.” The movie ends with a teacher instructing her students to steal and plagiarize. She claims that “nothing is original.” She does warn to steal only the things that speak directly to the student and that connection validly makes it their own. She then walks the room indoctrinating the children while erasing their ideas.

Part of Rosefeldt’s point is that manifestos become absurd when taken out of context. They burn brightly for a moment, but cannot last in an ever-changing world. Rather, if they do last, they become ridiculous. He achieves this through a balance of image, sound and speech. Rosefeldt compiled the script from actual manifestos written from the early 1900s through the early 2000s. During the span of 100 years, we see a variety of ideas demonstrated through art, architecture, drama and impersonation. I have only mentioned a few of the scenes in Manifesto. I encourage you to watch the scenes (or the whole movie) and post your thoughts. What does it say about art? About history? About characters or artists? Prepare for a disorienting experience, which is well worth your while. Visit Julian Rosefeldt’s website to view the film scene by scene.

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