Manifest
(Argentina, 2019)
Direction and script: Alejandro Rath.
Photography: Baltasar Torcasso.
Mounting: Ana Remón, José Goyeneche.
Performers: Pompeyo Audivert, Iván Moschner, César González, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, María Negro, Adriana de los Santos.
Duration: 61 minutes.
Available at Cine.ar
7 (seven) points
Guided by the challenge, Manifest informs its collective authorship. The script surely functioned as a changing road map, because it is the film that clarifies its dynamics: “From the shooting to the editing room in a random and permanent way”. All this is read in the final gloss with which the film closes. It is the very manifesto of a certain way of making cinema.
Manifest directed by Alejandro Rath (Who killed Mariano Ferreyra?, Alicia), and his proposal recreates the meeting held by Leon Trotsky and André Breton on the occasion of the drafting of the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art. The historical event occurred in Mexico in the 1930s. But these are not the data that the film indicates. You overlook them (thankfully) or take them for granted. It hardly suggests them. In addition, and with the superabundant information that circulates, anyone can consult about the minimum and indispensable facts that surrounded the writing of the manifesto. And by the way, read it.
Rather, Manifest is about the filming of a movie where Pompey Audivert and Iván Moschner play Trotsky and Breton. Moschner writes his doubts in letters that function like the intertitles of the silent cinema, prepares his suitcase and goes to meet the film. He fears that his dialogues are long and complex. Already in place, the actors share dinner. Or maybe it’s Breton and Trostsky. Does the difference matter? In this sense, the same shot shows reiterations of the same line of dialogue by Audivert: “Comrade Breton, the interest you give to the phenomenon of objective chance does not seem clear to me.” Is it part of the essay? Are they in Mexico or where? In any case, the cinema is capable of recreating his actions in any legendary place. There is a camera, actors and a shoot. Cinema makes travel to any world possible. In the manner of the dream.
The dream is the figure from which the film is articulated. A dream that imbricates in Bretonnian “objective chance”, which Trotsky discusses. Breton refutes him from psychoanalysis, in order to liberate the drive as a creative, artistic and revolutionary action; thus, the human being would be empowered by removing from himself the yoke that normalizes him. Art is unprejudiced, it is subversive. As of now, the dream does not appear in Manifest as a rhetorical figure, explaining “unrelated” actions, but rather as a staging of a fuzzy limit: Manifest it’s about Trotsky and Breton and about Audivert and Moschner, it’s fiction and it’s documentary, it’s Mexico and no, it’s the 1930s and it’s the present.
Being a historical manifestation of the moment in which it is inscribed, which is none other than this, Rath’s film inevitably updates what it discusses. Being related to art and politics and because it is a film, the discussion is also about cinema. What is cinema? The answers are not worth it. Better to stay with the intimate relationship that Buñuel established between it and the dream: “The cinema seems to have been invented to express the subconscious life,” he said.
A beautiful and dreamlike scene that the film offers is that of Breton paging a book in Braille, from the pages images of Entr’acte, the film by René Clair and Francis Picabia. Erik Satie’s music accompanies from the piano that is there, playing for Breton and the recreation of that extraordinary film. It is the appointment of an era, that of a cinema taken by storm by the avant-gardes, immersed in their political and aesthetic praxis.
Another great moment of Manifest it is the sequence of the worker (the filmmaker César González) who visits the factory alone, where he blows images of scorpions with a large stamp like a hammer. The striking of the operator – rhythmic like the Mechanical Ballet de Léger – cites the Soviet cinema of Eisenstein and Vertov in his purpose of a society of dialectical relationship with the machine. An invisible voice demands an insane amount of work, no art. The wink that continues to be Chaplinian: this is what happened to Charlot in Modern times, when the boss spoke / ordered him in an otherwise silent movie, where also and in an “equivocal” way the communist vagabond (who was really Chaplin) raised a red flag.
Manifest walk another of his daring in the being half human-half dog that he invokes. Maya, Trotsky’s dog, wanders free between the streets of a city inhabited by dressed, bathed, cared for, controlled dogs. A domesticated animality. The times of the writing of the manifesto are those of Stalinism and Hitlerism, against which revolutionary art attacks. How those words act in the present is another debate, to which the film appeals without saying so. What is clear is that the artistic task continues to liberate for those who do it and whoever receives it. What is problematic lies in recognizing and overcoming the police scaffolding promoted by capitalist logic, when today people naturally speak of “consuming” music, movies, and so on.
In your proceeding, Manifest it is thrown into an impossible undertaking because it is surreal, since no matter how much (semi) automatic writing is pursued, the images will finally be considered in their final organization. In any case, there is something that remains unbeatable, it is the mystery that produces the relationship between two images that do not have any relationship, it is the cataract of unsuspected possibilities that nest in the juxtaposition of images and sounds.
In this way, Rath’s film does not stop appealing to basic notions of audiovisual language in the pursuit of a plausible story, but with the aim of achieving moments that trigger associations and branch out. Thus, as an example, the sequence where Breton prays imprecations to the Virgin Cabeza by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, with her on stage. The influence of a text like Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art remains vital in finds like this one.
