Institute Benjamenta

Starring:Mark Rylance, Alice Krige, Gottfried John, Daniel Smith (IX), Joseph Alessi, Jonathan Stone, CÃ©sar Saracho, Peter Lovstrom, Uri Roodner, Peter Whitfield
Director: Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay
Studio: Kino Video
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

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 Axmaker

Customer Reviews:

Enter... and be astound..........2006-01-20

Enter "Institute Benjamenta" is entering a world that is almost... other worldy.
Strange maybe, but it's a world created by the twin brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay who are known for their claustrophobic animated shorts which are little dreamlike environments, filled with wood, iron, feathers, shattered glass and worn-out, strange little moving puppet things. Now there is their first live action feature and the Quays have managed to keep the dark brooding atmosphere that was so deliciously present in their early works.
The Institute is a school for butlers, but expect no standard training procedures. It feels more like some `last resort on earth', a school in which lessons are repeated to infinity and makes the students move and look like marionets.

There is no real story here, in the minds of the Quay brothers that concept probably doesn't even seem to exist. It's a series of tableaus in which not action or dialogue but movement is the main treat; there is the motion of the actors, who are sometimes directed to make seemingly unreasonable moves, and there is the perfect collaboration between lights, camera and editing. It's a ballet, a theatre of motion, and the spoken dialogue is more part of the music than of the plot.

The decors are incredibly detailed: pictures, mis-en-scene, objects, nothing escapes the eye of the filmmakers, who seem to operate even more as one single person, then most single movie directors do.
The result is a stunning and hypnotic film, shot in velvetish black and white, slow and wicked, some times too slow and wicked, but rewarding for those who can wait.

Place That Fork.......2005-01-08

Strangely haunting. If you are mesmerized by Butoh dance, then this movie should appeal--not for fidgeties predisposed to jazz dance.

I haven't seen this feature since it came out in 1996, yet I still have vivid imagery recurrences of the cinematography. Imagine linking a million painstakenly taken sequences of still photographs, printed in sepia-tone, and you'll get an idea what this movie is like to watch. How you view this movie will depend on your state of mind and you're patience for artistic self-absorbtion. Soon I will track it down and reabsorb.

The very best I ever saw.......2004-12-06

in black and white....How fascinating the light lies like water on Ms Benjamenta's face (first scene) and later flows golden from her mouth...Jacob van Gunten compared to a monkey and soon afterwards to a hart...Wonderful...Mystical...This is a movie you may watch, and then watch and watch and still enjoy it like the fairy tales of your childhood, only now they are filled with erotic implications. Funny moments in between. The right thing to buy and not only rent...I saw it quite often and still know not to have digested all seemingly meaningless meaningful details..The Robert Walser books are so delightful, too, much better than Kafka, who was rather influenced by Walser. Very precious never ending entertainment!

the quay bros are a trip.period........2004-06-20

these two directors are the answer to all the crappy movies forced upon the public these days.basically,all their films are done in distinctly different way by cinematagrophy,script,and just the whole "atmoshere" in general.if you think of yourself as an open-minded individual get this dvd and also pick up the collection of short films they've released(get that for "the street of crocodiles"alone!such a total trip!!!)if you find yourself getting rid of these after you've seen them then consider yourself not very open-minded at the least.

feast for your eyes.......2004-02-29

Beautiful imagery, intense plot line, lots of symbolism... This is a great movie.

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