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Jakob arrives at the Institute Benjamenta (run by brother and sister Johannes and Lisa Benjamenta) to learn to become a servant. With seven other men, he studies under Lisa: absurd lessons of movement, drawing circles, and servility. He asks for a better room. No other students arrive and none leave for employment. Johannes is unhappy, imperious, and detached from the school's operation. Lisa is beautiful, at first tightly controlled, then on the verge of breakdown. There's a whiff of incest. Jakob is drawn to Lisa, and perhaps she to him. As winter sets in, she becomes catatonic. Things get worse; Johannes notes that all this has happened since Jakob came. Is there any cause and effect?
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life, 벤야멘타 학원, Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream That One Calls Human Life, Institut Benjamenta, Instituto Benjamenta, Институт Бенжамента или Эту мечту люди зовут человеческой жизнью, Instytut Benjamenta, 本杰明学院, 벤자멘타 연구소
I’ve largely watched this in the boiling sun of a North Wales campsite (27C and no shade), and the strange lethargy that comes from such a place woozily chimed with the cool brightness of the Institute Benjamenta, a world that seems so full of airy clarity yet is infused with the stillness of dreams deferred and ambitions thwarted. Like Crocodiles, Benjamenta seemingly makes little to no sense, operating on a deeply melancholy internal logic. Images pass in front of our eyes, oneiric symbols that we recognise but can not decipher in their cinematic context; stags and their mating rituals, a goldfish in a giant bowl, dust rising from napkins. They return time and…
The Brothers Quay have been making brilliantly strange short films their entire career. These two American brothers work feels more European than American on many levels -- however, there are always deeper levels at play that refuse to be tied to any location or genre. A sort of disturbed beauty that often borders on unconfirmed horror.
In 1995 when they released their first (and only) feature length film I got in line to see it as soon as possible. I failed to write the date(s) when I first saw "Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life," but I saw it three times before it closed.
This highly experimental film is beautifully, gently and artistically shot by Cinematographer, Nicholas…
it's strange to like a movie this much and have nothing to say about it. It almost gives a new meaning to dreamlike in that it feels like an actual dream. It's possible that Guy Maddin was trying to achieve something like this in Saddest Music or Brand Upon the Brain, only this movie seems further removed into that other world, so that it is almost beyond access, like something reconstructed through the memories of other people.
In their first live action feature, the Quays do to the real world what they do to their carefully constructed miniatures in their animated short films: bathing them in an eerie play of sound and light, beneath a blanket of dreams.
Jakob (Mark Rylance) arrives during Lisa Benjamenta’s (Alice Krige) dream, as if he’s been summoned by it. He’s greeted by a monkey and shown into a strange and austere institution, ostensibly to learn servitude.
“There is but one lesson here, endlessly repeated, over and over again. We will learn very little here. None of us will amount to much. Later in life we shall all be something very small and subordinate.”
The Brothers were clearly on some Maddin shit for their first foray into live action/feature filmmaking, but the thing is, they kind of do it better. Absolutely stunning.
...and a spot of verse for National Poetry Month:
Bros. Quay Take on Shooting some Real-time cinema That's right- no stop motion here!
Q: Do deers eat pinecones? A: During the winter when food is scarce they have been known to eat pinecones, but it is not their preferred food source.
The dialogue that Quay/Quay wrote for this film is so haut-symboliste that it seems impossible for actors to deliver it meaningfully; anything that was meant to refer to emotional states arising from the interaction of one human being with another fell by the wayside. Or maybe it was me, handicapped by not being able to hear much of it very clearly. Nevertherthless, the Cornell-box universes that the Quays create are endlessly fascinating; I could watch Quayfilm of people folding napkins, opening and closing drawers, or swaying back and forth in unison every day and never weary of it.
There's a shot in this where the silhouette of Mark Rylance's body on a wall is angled to look like a man's head in profile that took my breath away, love this more than the Quays' stop motion stuff honestly
The Quay Brothers have an extraordinary feel for texture, just like one of their main influences, Jan Svankmajer. And not just the texture of objects (though that is there too). the texture of movement, the ways in which the camera can push in or pan across a body as that body jitters or flows down the eye-line, all suggesting character by the feeling of these motions.
And here, in their live action debut, it is this sense of texture that gives their film a truly otherworldly vibe, the way they shoot like they are shooting one of their stop motion films, only with real life people with real life emotions standing in the dioramas instead of puppets.
All I can say is that it is one of those few films that feels truly dream-like and strange and transfixing and also everyone is being very sensual with Mark Rylance in this
It comes as a disappointment to me that I find myself admiring a film solely for its acceptable visuals—which aren’t even particularly haunting. Maybe I’m slowly losing my sensitivity to dense atmospheres on screen, or maybe now, unlike five years ago (when I probably would’ve liked this more if I’d seen it then), I’ve come to care about how a filmmaker chooses to tell their story within the suffocating space they’ve crafted.
It’s not that I’m necessarily looking for a complex or multilayered narrative that leaves a lasting meaning. I simply prefer that, alongside the dreamlike shots filmed with real passion, there’s something present in the film that makes me care—something that, if I were to deliberately pause it halfway through, I wouldn’t feel indifferent to my surroundings, but a part of me would still be inside the movie, longing to go forward.
Plenty of close-ups at tortuous angles, mixed with abstract jazz and the oneiric stylings of Meshes of the Afternoon to make a spacious narrative about a service sub-in-training gazing at the stars.
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