There is a hypnotic fascination to this work by artist and film-maker Julian Rosefeldt, one of the few commercial films that explores the boundaries between cinema and installation, or cinema and video art. It owes this relative prominence to the presence of Cate Blanchett, who may be rivalling Tilda Swinton as Hollywood’s experimentalist and patron-muse.

Manifesto is, in fact, a development of a gallery piece that originally provided for many separate screens where Blanchett – in different disguises or personae – would, with beady-eyed intensity, declaim philosophical manifestos in bizarre dramatic contexts and weird empty locations. She performed screeds by the likes of Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Tristan Tzara, Olga Rozanova, Yvonne Rainer and Lars von Trier. These speeches have been stitched together for this film, occasionally intercutting, and Blanchett appears in the role of a tramp, or a hazmat-suited plant worker, or widow speaking at a funeral, or bland corporate CEO, or newsreader doing a piece to camera before speaking to a reporter outside in the rain.

The effect is like a work of sci-fi horror by Stanley Kubrick or JG Ballard, as if the world has been taken over by a zealot clone army of ideological commissars haranguing everyone about the need to wake up, tool up, use art to revolutionise humanity and humanity to revolutionise art. It also reminded me of Matthew Barney’s epic and experimental Cremaster Cycle, or Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens.

The language of the manifestos is gloriously idealistic and irresponsible: each is a call to action without a care for consequence, and this movie itself disregards the need for narrative consequence. It is about ideas. Blanchett has shown she has a talent for multiple impersonation after her Bob Dylan turn in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There and Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes. Manifesto is exhilarating – and funny.