"Manifesto": Avant-garde discourses in landscapes of neoliberal ruin

“Manifesto” by Julian Rosenfelt, with Cate Blanchette

The last century and particular the first three-quarters or so of it was an age of avant-garde artistic movements that were programmatic and linked at least loosely to forms of thinking associated with the ethos of year-zero revolutionary political movements. In postmodernist and neoconservative forms of thinking, that period's death was being announced by the early 1980s.  In light of this, I was curious what this film would do with these, grouped into 13 sets of artistic manifestoes representing programmatic art movements of the 20th century. The director performs a cinematic and theatrical mise-en-scène of each of them, in a manner that is disjunctive and ironizing throughout, a task for which his actress, who reappears with equal authoritativeness though in surprisingly varying personae in all of the segments, seems quite well employed. The tenor of the  entire film is determined by placing each of these haranguing declarations in the visual context of aspects of late capitalism and class divisions, from scenes of a de-industrialized landscape of decrepit former factories, to images of industrial production, to a television studio, to a classroom for small well-to-do children, to a conservative suburban home out of the 1950s, to an investment brokerage with tiered floors of workers inside what looks a bit like a library, to a gathering of wealthy art patrons in a waterfront home that seems to provide a stage-like portal onto a lake in the woods access to which it monopolizes. What Rosenfelt does is not just to ironize the texts on the basis of a search he obviously undertook to mine them for hidden meanings to be generated by discordant contextual juxtapositions. More than that, he embeds them all in a visual discourse about contemporary capitalist societies and their enclaves of privilege, industriousness, enjoyment, and disaffection. I was surprised to find in the end credits that it was all filmed in Germany, though in English. I would have placed parts of it in Northern England or the American rust belt. Take the opening scene of the almost bombed-out buildings: are there really places in Germany today like that? Anyway, the common setting is unmistakably that of First World capitalism today and how these various discourses both oppose it in certain ways and, perhaps, affirm it more fundamentally. The broad reason may be discerned from the Futurist segment: A discourse about an embrace of modernization and the aggressivity that may be associated with it. It may be thought that the broad point is that the neoliberal capitalism of today with its authoritarianism and social decay were actually advanced broadly by most of these “radical” and “revolutionary” discourses. That they are part of the problem is an inescapable conclusion of the film, and the other inference that comes with this is that they are part of the problem much more than any possible solution because while this kind of radicalism (that is: going to the root, or at least declaring the will to do so) may have often been articulated in counterpoint to the broadest tendencies in the society within which they arose, what it announced in each case, more or less, was something other than some great liberation. There is no indication that what any of these declarations were calling for either did or might have led to a truly different world. It is appropriate that the film starts and ends with the bombed-out factory landscape scene and a homeless man (Blanchette in one of her personae) echoing Marx’s Communist Manifesto, presented as the manifesto to begin and situate all subsequent manifestoes. That’s where Rosenfelt starts out and that’s where we still are. He could have dispensed with these very telling mises-en-scène and just varied Blanchett’s delivery, and then one might find the film conservative since it does seem to reject all these radicalisms.  (The broadly cultural as well as sexual, women’s, and gay liberations most associated with the 1960s do not seem to be endowed by the director and his star with any particular enchantment, but then, if the much more disenchanted perspective common at the present time is due in part to today’s social conditions, it is nonetheless they that must define the perspective of a contemporary film.  I think a careful look at the history of France in the 20th century would reveal important positive influences of the culture of Dadaism and Surrealism, two of the movements considered here, but the director is not French but German and even fans of Surrealism today are not apt, in France or anywhere else, to think our time a particularly happy or liberated one).  Conservative then, maybe, depending on how one assesses postmodernist and other discourses in theory since the 1970s.  Yes, a conservative would likely view all these discourses as merely satirized; I think if nothing else the settings suggest a different way of seeing these discourses and their hyperboles, just as the period being critically represented is both past and present.

The film offers no suggestion for what art might do and how it might think of itself today, except for this film itself and its style.  I often think that the most “radical” art can be divided into the critical and the visionary.  This film is resolutely and thoroughly critical.  Its premise is the banal and not very avant-garde one that art needs to take account of the conditions of life in the society in, and for, which it appears.  It is hard to escape the conclusion that what the filmmaker is really arguing for is a kind of Marxist skepticism based on a vaguely "dialectical" realist contextualization (embracing discursive ironies as fecund social contradictions).  What makes this skepticism towards radical change something other than conservative is that we are palpably reminded of the need that those efforts sought in various ways to address.