Manifesto – A published verbal declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party or government.

The manifesto is an important part of the human experience. Throughout our history, there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of manifestos issued to define some movement or another. From The Declaration of Independence to the 95 Theses to The Communist Manifesto to Dogme 95, many major movements have used manifestos to define their vision of life, then outline how and why they intend to perpetuate this vision of the world. Manifesto, a movie that was first installed as segments in a museum, collects a wide range of manifestos, dices them up, puts them next to each other, and then puts all the words into the mouth of a variety of Cate Blanchetts.

It all begins with Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto read over a burning fuse. As the sparks fade into darkness and the fuse burns down, Blanchett says “All that is solid melts into air.” This fragment of Marx leads into Dada Manifesto 1918 and then Philippe Soupault’s Literature and the Rest, which anticipated the surrealist movement. Bouncing from cubists to realists to surrealists to conceptual art to futurists, director Julian Rosefeldt throws a litany of declarations and rants into a blender, letting the past 150 years of movements bump and clash against each other, shaping them into a singular contradictory conversation that frequently conflicts against itself. Everybody is right; nobody is right. Everything matters; nothing matters.

If this all sounds like a bunch of pretentious twaddle about artists wanking their dicks while promoting their art as an all-important element that will define and change society as we know it, Rosefeldt agrees with you. If this sounds like an important conversation about how society is shaped by the ideas presented by the movements defined by our most “accepted” artists, Rosefeldt also agrees with you. He masters the contradiction and irony of the statements not just through juxtaposition, but also through the various personas of Cate Blanchett that gives voice to these manifestos. He gives Jim Jarmusch’s golden rules of filmmaking AND Lars Van Trier’s Dogme 95 to a grade school teacher instructing her class of disciples and correcting their work as if the people under her (their) wings are infants unable to think for themselves. Manuel Maples Arce’s A Strident Prescription, the manifesto for the Mexican avant-garde Stridentism movement, is sputtered out by a drunken tattooed punk in a disheveled dive bar. Rosefeldt’s simultaneously ironic and all too fitting settings simultaneously undercut and reinforce the idea that these manifestos are important works of intelligent blowhards through history. In a way, it becomes a sociopolitical art movement version of Waking Life.

By presenting all of these ideas as a single conversation coming from an anonymous voice, Rosefeldt creates an ironic post-modern manifesto of his own that attempts to capture many of the major movements of the past 150 years or so. By keeping the words anonymous until the end of the credits puts all of the manifestos on equal footing of importance. But, the anonymity also presents the film’s most daunting entry. Few people have read The White Manifesto, Preface to the Blue Rider Almanac, Supremacist Manifesto, Fluxus Manifesto, all of the various Dada manifestos, and every other manifesto referenced in the movie. Because each manifesto bumps into each other, only the most well read of audiences will be able to decipher where one voice and/or manifesto ends and another begins. All the situational signposts – year, location, what was happening politically and artistically in the world – are stripped from the words, leaving the audience unmoored in a sea of voices.

Rosefeldt doesn’t help the audience either. He unifies the voices through his visual techniques, retaining a strict formalist visual style that borrows elements from various art movements, but not necessarily from the movement being spoken at the time. Manifesto is a remarkably visual piece of art that redefines didactic cinema. In its original presentation as a multi-screen museum piece, each segment fought each other for dominance depending on a patron’s proximity, but one has to wonder if that exhibit came with signage or a pamphlet that defined which voice and movement was in each section. In this iteration, the viewer has to wait until the end of the credits before Rosefeldt lists every manifesto included in each section during the credits scroll.

By not defining who is speaking when, it simultaneously smashes the words together in a singularity and encourages the audience to play a game of “which movement/whose voice is this?” History is a jumble of ideas all striving for dominance, and this streaming gives everybody and nobody their five minutes. Manifesto is a tour de force whirlwind through the building blocks of modern culture. It’s also a frustrating experience that refuses to provide road signs for the uninitiated. This piece of work demands repeat viewings, and educating yourself to understand what it is doing at any single moment. There’s something thrilling in that trust, but presents a high bar of entry.