Starring Cate Blanchett. Rating unavailable

How do you convey the ideas behind modern art without getting people to stare at the wall? Well, you can make sure what’s on the wall keeps moving. That’s part of what is behind Manifesto, which funnels more than a century’s worth of aesthetic proclamations—and some overtly political constructions—into one actor playing 13 roles in myriad locations, with a variety of accents, ages, and genders.

Good thing that actor is Cate Blanchett, since it’s hard to imagine anyone else with the fluidity, dramatic presence, and ornery playfulness to pull off such a feat without undue grandiosity. (Let’s remember now that she was the most convincing of all the Dylans in I’m Not There.) Not that pomposity and outright comedy aren’t part of the mix for Munich-born artist turned director Julian Rosefeldt, who shoves intentionally silly words into solemn occasions—as when one of the Cates spouts Dada goofiness to a funeral gathering—and creative profundities into humdrum settings, as when a cardigan-wearing hausfrau quotes Jean-Luc Godard at the family dinner.

It’s impressive enough to see how Blanchett invented all these personas, with their attendant makeup and costume requirements, in a 12-day shoot—with her voice utilized both on-screen and off-, alongside harshly percussive music. But even more striking is the way Rosefeldt and cinematographer Christoph Krauss managed to find, construct, or create the illusion of so many complete worlds to place around her. Some are as intimate as a grotty English bed-sit or a smoky nightclub filled with ennui-laden goth rockers (a black-haired Blanchett has a huge Peter Lorre arm tattoo for this one), while others depict a massive scientific laboratory, a vast stock-market trading floor, or an abandoned East Berlin factory.

Most of the 95-minute film—originally presented as a 13-screen installation—was in fact shot in Germany, an oft-devastated nexus point for many of the manifestoes regarding capitalism. It’s fitting that things begin with Karl Marx’s words about the West’s “process of decay”, already in motion 150 years ago but suddenly relevant today. Elsewhere, fascistic and nihilist credos are included (some taken from the Italian futurists of the early 20th century), and it’s fascinating to see them collide and occasionally overlap. You have to wait for the credits to see which words come from, say, André Breton or from Jim Jarmusch—no women, as usual. But even if you can’t parse all the recombinant elements here, Rosefeldt entertains all the senses while getting at the way art goes beyond language to explore the politics of life, both transitory and enduring.