Abstract
Experimental films have historically had a contested and marginalized position within film exhibition. With his Manifesto (2015), which has been exhibited both as a video installation in art galleries and as a feature film in movie theatres, Julian Rosefeldt collapsed the barriers between these exhibition spaces. By performing a comparative analysis of Manifesto in both forms, this article outlines the way spectators behave differently in the theatre and the gallery, the different demands the work makes on the viewer in each venue, and the difficulties of transforming the work from one form to another. By asking what is lost and what is gained, this article explores how the text, form, and venue function differently, to reveal underlying assumptions about spectatorship.
 
 Article received: December 31, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper
 
 How to cite this article: Ljungbäck, Hugo. "From Art Gallery to Movie Theatre: Spectatorship in Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): 135–146. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.237
Highlights
In early January 2017, Cate Blanchett fans and art film enthusiasts alike rejoiced as they learned that Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, his synthesis of over fifty artists’ manifestos from a variety of twentieth-century art movements, would be released as a feature-length film
Experimental films have historically had a contested and marginalized position within film exhibition. With his Manifesto (2015), which has been exhibited both as a video installation in art galleries and as a feature film in movie theatres, Julian Rosefeldt collapsed the barriers between these exhibition spaces
By performing a comparative analysis of Manifesto in both forms, this article outlines the way spectators behave differently in the theatre and the gallery, the different demands the work makes on the viewer in each venue, and the difficulties of transforming the work from one form to another
Summary
In early January 2017, Cate Blanchett fans and art film enthusiasts alike rejoiced as they learned that Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, his synthesis of over fifty artists’ manifestos from a variety of twentieth-century art movements, would be released as a feature-length film. Manifesto is exhibited as an hour-and-a-half long feature film in an anthology-like format, in which Blanchett portrays thirteen characters in different ‘episodes’ – from a plant worker and a puppeteer to a scientist and a. While Manifesto is worthy of many more dissections and discussions than is possible here, this article will focus primarily on the process by which Manifesto was transformed from video installation to feature-length film – a process which Rosefeldt has remarked took almost a year1 – and how the work functions differently in these venues (or, maybe, how it fails to function ). This article argues that the gallery and the theatre place different demands on the spectator, and on the work. This article argues instead that Manifesto attempts to do different things as an installation and as a feature film
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