"Manifesto" director Julian Rosefeldt talks creating 13 Cate Blanchetts
Artist Julian Rosefeldt teamed with Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett for "Manifesto," a collage of artistic intentions that blends the doctrines of several artistic titans and relates them through a series of characters embodied by Blanchett.
Rosefeldt talked to CBS News about creating the worlds of "Manifesto" and the pressure that comes with meeting Blanchett.
How did this collaboration with Cate first come together?
We met in 2010 while she was in Berlin shooting a movie. She came to an opening of my work, and we started talking. Kind of simultaneously we had the idea to do something together, then we maintained contact for a few years but I wasn't really clear on what I wanted to do. When Cate Blanchett invites you to collaborate on a project, you don't have five ideas for her in your pocket. I knew that I wanted her to be many, many people at once -- that's the one thing that I had clear -- and I knew I wanted to touch the art world in some way. Then I came across these manifesto texts again, and reading them again and imagining Cate performing them rather than reading them, I was sure that that was what I wanted to do. I also felt that they were really relevant again in our times.
How did you decide which manifestos to tie to which characters and settings?
I wanted to forget about the visual works of those artists, forget the context of art history. They were mainly written long before the artists' visual works were there, since manifestos are normally written when you're a very young and insecure person, at that moment when you shout out your very secure opinion -- "I know exactly how it has to be!" We always read them as texts by powerful artists, when it's actually the opposite. They were very fragile, insecure young people.
How did you go about selecting the specific manifestos?
It was a very painful process because we had so many more characters in mind and couldn't do all of them. First of all, there was time. We had only two weeks total with Cate, including testing for makeup and wardrobe. So we only had 11 shooting days, which was insane, to do all that. And thinking about the art world, where I normally show my work, and it was originally an installation. We needed to be nice to the museums and not ask them for 50 projectors. So we decided to cut it down to a dozen text collages and the introduction.
Through this process, did you end up being inspired to pen a manifesto of your own?
Um, no. I wouldn't risk to say that. These artists are far too smart. But if there's one thing that we share, it's maybe that I used to say that art is a seismograph of its time and conditions of the time, expressed through their art and through their language. Maybe "Manifesto" is my comment subconsciously or consciously of what's going on in the world now with the uprising of populism. Although I must say, of course that when Cate and I started to work on this, we could never imagine that three years later the world would be as it is now. It wasn't such a clear statement that we had in mind, but more that we sensed that there was something very relevant in our piece. Like the "fake news" thing in the newsreader's section, it was very funny. I was shocked when I heard the audience laughing at Sundance the first time. I thought, "What's going on? What happened?" Then I understood, it was something about Trump.
"Manifesto" is currently playing New York and Los Angeles before expanding to other cities.