Institute Benjamenta
by Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Alice Krige, Daniel Smith, Gottfried John, Joseph Alessi, Mark RylanceDirector: Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay
Writer: Stephen Quay
Writer: Timothy Quay
Producer: Janine Marmot
Producer: Karl Baumgartner
Producer: Katsue Tomiyama
Producer: Keith Griffiths
Writer: Alan Passes
Writer: Robert Walser
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); German (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 104 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-08-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Kino Video
Movie Reviews of Institute Benjamenta
Movie Review: brilliance
Summary: 5 Stars
Institute Benjamenta is a brilliant brew of dream, N.European myth, Buddhist philsophy, and emotional repression and longing, and asks us what it means to exist in a world. It's mesmerizing in dark-toned black and white, full of rich textures and fascinating camerawork, often coming across as a film and story from 100 years ago. Maybe unsurprisingly; it's based on the German novel Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser (who was possibly mad), written in 1908, though for the Quays this is only a jumping off point. It also seems to pay homage to Bruno Schultz, who mined similar literary territory in Poland some thirty years later. The film asks other questions - who saves, and who is saved? What is nihilism and what is freedom? And it has plenty of strange and subtle humor as well. The music, by Lech Jankowski, is great - somber cellos here, free jazz explosions there, broad humor ensembles here, medieval psalms there.
Rylance, Krige, and John excel in their roles as humiliated nobody (and anti-hero), haunted longing headmistress, and passionate crazed headmaster. The students in Walser's novel were actually youngsters, and the Quays smartly transpose them into the childishness of adult pupils, which gives the movie yet another layer of meaning. The actors who portray them also do a great job... A tremendous meditation full of symbolism and craft that becomes richer with repeated viewings.
Well, topically speaking it's about Jacob, a person lost in a dream, who goes to an institute (perhaps in Switzerland) to learn to become a servant to wealthy folks, at the turn of the century. They have lessons - strange apparently meaningless ones, and there is antagonism between students as there always is in reality - they are definitely adults being kids.... The Institute is run by brother and sister, and their relationship with Jacob is by turns confusing, controlling, and erotic. Jacob wonders at the Institute - what are they learning? Why are they there? What's going on? All in his dreamy odd way.... The richness of it, though, lies in the many layered images and mythic/religious references, along with it's superbly off-kilter low-key humor. A man biting a pine cone? Hmm..
Summary of Institute Benjamenta
A dejected, hopeless soul, Jakob (Mark Rylance, Angels and Insects) walks through the door of a dilapidated mansion and into a shadowy world pitched somewhere between the 19th century and the imagination. It's a school for servants, where Jakob is prepared to sacrifice his individuality for a life of servitude and subservience. "There's but one lesson repeated endlessly," he observes. "None of us will amount to much. Later in life we will be something small and subordinate." Jakob throws himself into his repetitive, meaningless exercises, learning the fine art of humiliation at the hands of his lovely but haunted teacher, Lisa Benjamenta (Alice Krige), who runs the slowly collapsing school with her demanding, lonely brother, Johann (Fassbinder regular Gottfried John). The live-action feature debut of surrealist animators the Brothers Quay, Institute Benjamenta is a dreamy, self-contained world rich in physical detail (obscure signs, the bric-a-brac and detritus of yesteryear), which cinematographer Nic Knowland captures with a foggy, gauzy black-and-white softness, like a turn-of-the-century film. Full of fantasies and dream sequences and laced with brief snippets of animation, it's a film of strange and wondrous imagery, but an elusive story that loses itself in long, meditative sequences of monotonous action and droning narration. Many will find the deliberate pacing slow going, but this deliriously strange and fragile world lost in its own timelessness offers a mesmerizing dream alternative to traditional narrative cinema. --Sean AxmakerSimilar DVD Movies
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