Among independent cinema’s many trends during the halcyon 1990s was the nostalgic revival of German expressionism and monochrome. Films such as Guy Maddin’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Ildikó Enyedi’s My 20th Century, Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog, Christopher Nolan’s Following and Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, along with the music videos and art photography of Rocky Schenck and the short films of Jan Švankmajer, imagined the millennium’s last decade using the gothic palette of the 1920s.
American stop-motion animators Stephen and Timothy Quay’s first feature-length film Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life, is one of the most cryptic, and visually spectacular, entries in this neo-expressionist genre. Shot in high-contrast black-and-white with low-grain film stock (early prints were reportedly created using an obsolete stock made by East German company Orwo), it mimics the textures of a Weimar-era horror film. Institute is a gauzy adaptation of Swiss writer Robert Walser’s bildungsroman Jakob von Gunten, published in 1909. Unlike the urban-set novel, which Walser wrote after briefly training as a butler in Berlin, the Quays’ version is presented as a placeless fairytale – with elements lifted from another Walser drama Snow White, which they had also explored in their short film The Comb. The world of Benjamenta rarely strays beyond the Institute’s walls. Instead, from the moment the meek Jakob (Mark Rylance) rings the front door and is greeted by a capuchin monkey, protagonist and viewer are ushered into an Orphic mystery filled with ciphers and rituals that rarely acknowledge the outside world.
“Sometimes more life lies hidden in the opening of a door than in a question,” Jakob soliloquizes as he wanders the Institute’s labyrinthine hallways. His reason for attending the school is not to learn to question or to receive an education, but the opposite: to abandon all willfulness and perfect his etiquette for a lifetime of servitude. The question of knowledge is summed up in the Institute’s motto – “A little, but thoroughly”. So, Jakob’s classes are bizarre affairs of repeating meaningless axioms, moving balletically in place while holding a napkin or imaginary dish or repeatedly thrumming the tines of a fork. His classmates’ exaggerated gestures and facial expressions suggest those of silent actors or automatons. The instructor is the stony Fraulein Benjamenta (Alice Krige), sister of the school’s principal (Gottfried John), both of whom are drawn inexplicably to Jakob while carrying on an incestuous tryst behind closed doors. Since the world beyond the school does not exist for the Benjamentas, neither do its taboos. Rather, in the Fraulein’s words, they are trapped in a fairytale and she, like Snow White, is “waiting for life to stir her”.
Jakob is intent on locating the Institute’s inner chambers, where he is sure the mystery of the Benjamentas will be revealed. But this proves a difficult task, as the building has a dizzying floor-plan. He becomes lost behind hidden doorways or, in one instance, walks blindfolded through a chalkboard and into a sprawling garden, which resembles a garish, Busby Berkeley stage-set. Many rooms are decorated with deer antlers or images of stags, including a vitrine of powdered stag ejaculate that appears like snow. Small placards written in multiple languages impart bits of wisdom or direct Jakob to different wings of the house. Water periodically flows down the walls as if from vast leaks in the roof, and aqueous light oscillating through the windows cast exaggerated shadows in the darkness.
“All around hangs a slumber upon these halls, and things as yet unfathomed still occur,” the Fraulein intones like a sleepwalker. In this world of half-sleep, even the cogs of a perpetual motion machine are laden with dust.
Such odd flourishes and details supply the greatest pleasures of Institute Benjamenta, though they are often observed only with a second or third viewing. The Quays’ background as animators is on full display, creating a world of miniature that hovers somewhere between storybook fantasy and paranoid agoraphobia. Perhaps because of its overwhelming visual flair, the film’s stilted dialogue, repeatedly delivered as voice-overs by Rylance and Krige, often feels contrived and less spectacular by comparison. Unlike Walser’s novel, which is a hodgepodge of gossip, quotidian musings and exuberant satire, the film’s actions are solemn and languid with a grimness that almost borders on self-parody. Instead, it is Lech Jankowski’s score, a medley of cool jazz and mitteleuropean chamber music, that is the best accompaniment to the sumptuous imagery.
For all of its optical delights and bantam details, Institute Benjamenta is a remarkable artwork from a singular directing duo. Following the film’s release, the Quays returned to shorts, animation and stage projects for a decade before directing The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, their only other feature-length film, in 2005. Collaborations on music videos and commercials for clients as diverse as Sparklehorse, DJ Spooky, Kellogg’s and Comme des Garçons have continued to introduce their animation and puppetry to wider audiences.
Benjamenta, however, remains an underappreciated classic in their filmography, and a groundbreaking artifact of 1990s indie cinema.
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life is available on Amazon Prime in the US and UK
