SIFF 2017: Manifesto (Julian Rosefeldt, 2015)

Note: as this film is under embargo until its release in the Seattle area, here are exactly 75 words.

Cate Blanchett plays 13 characters reciting dozens of artistic manifestos, from Marx to Dogma ’95 and everything in-between. It isn’t literally watching a favorite actor read the phone book, but the spliced-together manifestos are too many, too jumbled and too contextless to pull any kind of coherent meaning from the project. Instead, it’s at its best when Blanchett plumbs humor from the (necessarily) self-important and incandescent material, as with her Dada funeral oration and diction-perfect Conceptualist/Minimalist newscasters.