What’s an actor to do throughout a pandemic? There are Zoom plays, do-it-yourself music movies concerning the trials of love in lockdown, or, when you’re Cate Blanchett, avant-garde video tasks exploring the human situation. As of Friday, on the Michael Fuchs Galerie in Berlin, you may watch Blanchett flip inside out two easy phrases—“I like you” and “I don’t love you”—in Marco Brambilla’s video The 4 Temperaments. (For those who’re staying nearer to dwelling as of late, you can even expertise the work, as of immediately, by way of the augmented actuality app Acute Art.)
Blanchett’s pulsing iterations of the phrases are filtered via 4 totally different colours, her face bathed in a carmine yellow glow one minute and traffic-light inexperienced the subsequent. The colours are supposed to evoke the 4 humors as described by the traditional Greek thinker and medical author Galen, with every tone comparable to a particular temperament: sanguine (yellow), choleric (pink), melancholic (blue), and phlegmatic (inexperienced).
Cate Blanchett in a nonetheless from Marco Brambilla’s The 4 Temperaments.
This isn’t the primary time that Blanchett has participated in a challenge extra at dwelling in a museum than a multiplex. In 2016, the actor starred in 13 quick movies, concurrently projected within the cavernous Park Avenue Armory in Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto. That work transplanted the texts of historic manifestos—by visionaries starting from the Dadaists and Russian summary artist Kazimir Malevich to filmmaker Jim Jarmusch—and the impact was disorientingly highly effective. Dated didacticism, when animated by a genre-bending character (a lady resembling an elementary faculty instructor, or a wandering homeless man—all performed by Blanchett), felt recent and eye-opening.
