User Reviews

A quiet and softly spoken man arrives at a ghostly building to enrol for the servants class taught there. He rings the doorbell and is greeted by a monkey's face through the small hole in the door. The man's name is Jakob. He enters and meets one of the two owners (a brother and sister). The brother is unpleasant, and informs Jakob that there are no favourites here.

Jakob goes into class to meet the other students. They all announce their names to him and then fall over. The lessons are presumptuous and iterative. They involve the men swaying from side to side and standing on one leg. They really are quite eccentric. The institute seems to be its own little world away from reality, with its low ceiling rooms. The sister soon has a strange fondness for Jakob. This is a very sombre film, but has a unique air to it. The pacing is pedestrian, but you stay with it. The acting is good, and the camerawork is meticulous and probing.

If this has a meaning beyond the one on the surface, which carries no conviction, it must be one of the classic horror films. But I can't see that it does. The authoritarian, sexually perverse world that it depicts seems the creation of someone who has never experienced oppression or obsession at first hand and so has nothing to say about it. The film is a totally artificial and hermetic work. On the other hand, its distance from reality allows its manufacturers to take as much time as they please to refine and distill its essence, as in a bottle. But what is it they're distilling? Whatever it is, it gives off a lovely scent. One exquisite shot follows another; the actors are perfectly cast. Alice Krige I suppose can be called a cult figure (I'm one of the cult), and in this film she has finally found the ideal environment. It's never uninteresting, never unattractive--but it should have been disturbing and it isn't. Some day I hope to find something inside it.

I would give a 7.5 to the movie, it really earned 3/4 of a perfect movie but many would not pay interest in this movie and people should. A bunch of interesting scenes really worth some interest even if some points are averaging the quality of the whole movie. Artistically, this movie is a cake. The lighting has become a reference for me as underexpose movie, such as Werckmeister Harmonies. I also would make cross references to this movie for the minimal use of speech and the intensity of the musical score, with a good presence, wisely use.

Some animation scenes contains a lot of inner emotion such as the one with the bullet path. Actress Alice Krige is troubling in his role, bringing all the strengh and the intensity in the movie, bringing the movie to a straighter line than all the dreamy but unfocused storyline ; so goes the bad side of the movie. It is easy to excuse a movie that is about dramatize to be unclear, but the spectators can't see clues or signs about what the authors really wanted to say in here. Even if life is hard to understand, can it be an excuse to make things that don't have to have a point? It finally is a highly sensitive movie in which ends up with no storyline, just pictured emotions. But it was enough to make me enjoy the movie, and i hope people will see that this part worth the movie.

Institute Benjamenta is an oddity. Let me say that first, get it out of the way. Part of me hesitates from revealing here that it is one of my favourite films of all time because I know I'll make some people reading this mini-review approach it from the wrong angle. A film like this should never become required viewing. You should stumble across it at a repertory cinema somewhere or be beguiled by the video-box art showing the striking visage of Alice Krige as she paces before her blackboard, deerfoot staff in hand. You should find one evening that its the only thing that sounds interesting on TV, or peer at a still alongside a mention in your TV guide and wonder what on earth the picture is supposed to depict. Contained between main and end credits here is a world so visually ravishing and technically abstruse that you are only in the film while you are watching; the rules of the outside do not apply. You peer into the dreamy, foggy black-and-white and what you can't identify for certain your imagination fills out. These are the most special special effects because you wonder 'what' and 'why' by never 'how.' The Institute of the title is a school for servants, the lessons they are taught bizarre and repetitive to the point of making 'deja-vu' a permanent state of being. Is the repetition the point of it all or has the teacher lost the plot? If she has, how come we care? None of this is vaguely like real life. None of it, that is, bar the characters emotions. Or is the whole thing like real life, like Life with a capital 'L?' In the end does this sort of pondering make for a good movie? I won't answer that because I'm terribly biased. Remember the title and look it up sometime. It's the cinematic equivalent of a stunning old-fashioned magician's trick. A monochrome bouquet, a sad smile. There are images, scenes that may make the hairs on the back of your neck think they're a cornfield with a twister on the way. I tried to warn you as quietly as I could.

A truly wonderful film that slowly unfolds images of great beauty before you. I particularly like the through the keyhole moment and the dust being brushed aside by the clock pendulum. But mentioning specific scenes is to distract from the whole work which is I am sure is as close to a dream as one would get without sleeping. I adore Alice Krige in it and the way scenes have been constructed with the actors placed within the whole composition of the frame. I would not recommend this film, rather I think it is much better to discover it yourself and cherish it.

It is fairly rare that moving pictures are made with real artistic value in mind and even more rare when the endeavor pays off. Well, The Quay brothers' Institute Benjamenta is one such picture. At first sight it might appear a little too pretentious with an abounding array of hidden symbolism of a strange and antique meaning but then again, the basic thread of the picture is as old as humanity itself, pointing back to the ancestral roots of what makes us human: to love and to loose. It is remarkable the technique and the rendering of the camera in the Quay brothers' masterpiece. You cannot but help wondering if the images themselves are not centuries old and, in a sense, that is exactly the aim of the picture, to make itself look old and timeless, at the same time. I urge anyone who is really looking for that special feeling films give us, far from commercialism and hollywoodia, to see this movie. Sure, most of you will find it a little bit hard to watch but if you give it patience and let the mood of the picture fill you from within your imagination then I think this will be a rewarding cinematic experience.

This story about love, death, pride and loneliness. The story about mask of a pride on everybody in our society, and loneliness and love under this mask. The best of human emotions never to come out from this mask. This is one of most strong self-contradiction in our society. Everybody hide his own emotions and only mask of pride and lie see to the outer world. From this contradiction born loneliness and death.

In this film every frame is a beautiful photograph work. Any frame can be viewed on art exhibition. Masters of light and depth resolution. No any unnecessary details in every frame. All of attention on needed elements of frame. It is a great.

This is deep philosophy and social story, and uncommon beautiful film.

My score 9 of 10.

In reading the comments, it occurred to me that many who have watched this film have missed the point. There are some very thoughtful comments to be sure and this is a very thought provoking film. I think that the analogy between this film and Eraserhead is a valid one but not for the reasons stated. Institute Benjamenta and Eraserhead are both films that to my mind are not to be viewed in the same way as Hollywood fare where plot and story is everything. These films are meant to be appreciated in the same way you would go to a museum and look at something by Van Gogh or Dali. These films are cinema paintings designed to wash over you and envelope you in a way that a plot-based film traditional film seldom does. Most filmmakers are strapped tightly into a box which is the "Hollywood Formula". That form is very rigid and if you want to make films consistently in Hollywood you have to conform. The Brothers Quay have paid dearly for their invention and artistry. It's very hard for them to get money to make these films. They don't need to fix "Institute" by being better, we need to fix ourselves for being too limited in our acceptance of what a film can be. This film is a work of unbridled genius. I only say "God Bless them and give us MORE!

Every now and again a film like Institute Benjamenta comes along which seems to have the sole purpose of testing the endurance of its audience to the limit. I saw it at the home of art-house cinema in the UK, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and was intrigued to notice that even here, where it could reasonably expect a sympathetic viewing, over half of the (small) audience decamped to the bar well before it ground to a close. I stuck it out to the end only because my companion seemed riveted, but it turned out she was hanging on grimly thinking I was similarly entranced! Mark Rylance (a wonderful actor) goes through the film with the expression of a mildly startled rabbit on his face, as if he couldn't quite believe what he had got himself into - neither could I.

Not for all tastes, Institute Benjamenta is like David Lynch's The Elephant Man via the works of Bergman and silent expressionism. Every single frame in the bizarre odyssey is tightly composed and beautifully printed in black and white. The use of shifts in focus and depth, and the wild juxtapositions of the most mundane actions, allowing them to take on any number of connotations only heightens the floating dream like atmosphere, as we are dumped into this world with no idea of what is going on, or what is going to happen. But this film is terribly slow (this is were the Bergman element comes into play), and it's a test of the viewer's concentration to see the film through. But unlike Bergman, Institute Benjamenta does not pay off at the end, nor does it leave the viewer puzzled, conflicted and desperate to experience the film again (ala Persona).

Instead Institute Benjamenta just ends, and personally I have no desire to watch the film again, I felt I got everything I could and wanted to gain from the experience. The acting was good, suitably distant and with the right level of cold detachment, but there was a constant feeling the actors were plating second fiddle to the sumptuous visuals put on show by the famed animators the brothers Quay. It's sad that they have yet to make another live action film, as the wealth of great ideas and knowledge of film-making displayed in Institute Benjamenta is one-hundred times better than most of the recent films I've seen, if the Brothers had put a little more time into the depth of the narrative, they could have backed up those haunting images with some much needed substance.

This is not a film for everyone, as I have already stated. The nonsensical narrative and bursts of surrealism will undoubtedly put off some viewers, but this is a film that should have a wider audience. In a cinematic world of conventions and formulas the brothers Quay made a film that, although by no means great, showed originality and definite promise, that makes Institute Benjamenta a film worthy of cult classic status.

This is one of those films that sort of rides the line of being either painfully pretentious or enchantingly magical. Depending on the person you are, you'll either hate it for being "an artsy-fartsy self handjob of pretension and bullsh*t symbolism that doesn't make any goddamn sense", or love it for being a beautiful, surrealistic little fantasy. I belong to the latter group of people, not because I am a pretentious hipster or anything like that, but because I enjoy travelling to other worlds, and this film allowed me to do so. It has beautiful cinematography and an enchanting, yet bizarre and gloomy setting filled with quirky characters, fascinating sets, and painful tragedies. The performances are also quite excellent, especially those of the two leads, Mark Rylance and Alice Krige. Their performances both brilliantly convey their characters dry, emotionless states as well as their dramatic, emotionally heavy ones.

The film also has a great sense of humor despite being so dreary. The humor is mostly present in the first half of the film, in which many of the best sequences are thrown at the audience with an entertaining passion. The humor is all dark and absurd, much like the tone of the film itself. It is always due to a little, zany quirk in a character's movement, tone, facial expression, etc. It gets awkward and weird to a point of hilarity.

This film is essentially "Eraserhead", but all of the horrific elements are replaced with more poetic and dramatic elements. It works exquisitely well, and the Brothers Quay did a great job adapting their style to feature length cinema. Their surreal world is wonderful to dive into!

From the Quay Brothers, all that you might expect in their first feature film but less than you would hope for. The photography is quite beautiful, uniquely so, and some of the sequences are stunning; unfortunately the surrealism often comes off as forced, and the focus of each scene seems too often misplaced.

The actors do a fine job one and all, with particular kudos to Alice Krige. There's a dark humor to the piece which often helps its cause. But it all too often seems like a music video which lacks even a good beat to carry you along.

It reminded me of "Eraserhead", Bergman, Terry Gilliam, and Alan Resnais, but on each count not enough.

Better luck next time....

...especially Alice Krige! The directing, however, I would have liked more without its over enthusiastic surreal demeanour. The story and essence of the picture as well as its atmosphere and its meaning in reference to the real world fall much to short. What a waste of attitude and art as the ideas of presenting and most acting were captivating. But in lack of a coherent story the movie became what it is...art, with a meaning somewhere to find (Dalí meets a narcissistic form of Kafka) - instead of a beautiful and moving picture with deep meaning.

All just for art's sake? e.g. why is she speaking Dutch and other languages several times? Why overdoing it? Why this shabby and in a way arrogant symbolism?

Didn't read the book by Robert Walser (Jakob von Gunten) - but now I'm interested and hope it's better.

The first time I saw this movie, I fell asleep--but I don't blame the movie at all. I was tired. Before I fell asleep, I found it frustrating and oblique. But when I woke up, suddenly the dream logic of the movie seemed to make sense. Then I saw it again.

Often compared to Eraserhead, I think this movie has much, much more to offer than Lynch's first feature. Institute Benjamenta doesn't have any kind of decoder...in fact, it refuses any. Filmed in a hazy, drowsy black-and-white, with scenes of flat, if surreal, simplicity, interspersed with dreamy, nonsensical interludes, it must be accepted before it can be enjoyed.

The comparison to David Lynch's "Eraserhead" is important but only in an opposite way. While Lynch's first feature (and still the best) relies strongly and almost only on directors vision and artistic "feel" (without any philosophy, just a free thought) this one found an inspiration in poetry and tried to transcend it into a living world. So, the wrong approach is more than obvious. How can anybody turn poetry into a motion picture. The answer is: only if you approach the film the same way as some poet might approach his poem - with senses and instinct, nothing else. And that is where the Quay brothers failed. They tried to put poetic vision into a hermetic space and, of course it doesn't work. Photography and acting are excellent but they are not much important here. For me, the whole scenery and the plot is unnecessary and got very little to do with the philosophy of dialogues. It is just there to fill the visuals. And then you end up with something that's not exactly a film but not exactly anything else either. Still, true artistic films are so rare today, that even a weak one is more than welcome in a world of superficial art. Let's just hope that it will be better next time, for brothers Quay and for us.

for atmosphere. and for the performances. for the fragile border between dream and reality. and for the details. a dark story , an obscure institute . a parable about communication and desire and school and skills and expectations. after its end, not the story remains as memory but crumbs of scenes who seems be words of a prophecy. because the ladder air is the only significant piece of a story about nothing. sure, the memories about similar stories are many. important is the small detail who defines this film - the ambiguity of things, gestures and words.like a huge illusion. so, a film remembering Kafka.

Film is a constant war between the forces of narrative. On one side are the forces of personality: we simply like to think in terms of characters in situations. Few things are as rich as the human face, and nothing as compelling as curiosity about people. But this is something that transcends film. In fact it is so common that film leverage of this narrative compulsion must be slight. These kinds of films, even the ones that capture me, aren't really films. They are illustrated books or recorded plays.

On the other side, we have an emerging visual grammar, one that speaks more directly to the imagination through that part of the brain that comprehends without reasoning. This is where great films are grounded, in mining and extending this grammar. Cheap films exploit the old form; art invents.

The Quays were solidly in the second category. Their short 'Are We Still Married' is on my list of best films of all time. In their work prior to this (not counting music videos), they eschewed personality, even excoriated it. The films were densely visual with the narrative completely imbued in a diffuse visual environment. Pretty good stuff, plus puzzling and often disturbing.

Now they cross the line. Now they enter the world of theater with real people, a linear story, sex as normally read. Sure, the environment is 'dark,' and the staging is highly stylized. But the characters are pretty familiar, even to the point that we get swept up in the erotic tragedy.

This is still worth watching because of the camera eye and the animated lighting. (Oh, that hidden implication of a shifting animator behind the scenes is sweet, and just below the surface. The 'Svankmejer' doors are nice. But otherwise, this just isn't in the class with their other films. Those are art, This is a lost battle, in fact the battle depicted (between obsessive sense and the monotonous commitment of their prior animation).

Watching this film was a treat. Slow at times, but so stunningly poetic all the time, and once in a while, really intense. As if Kafka and Bergman had just watched "Eraserhead" and decided to do something together. Sort of.

Unfortunately I was not able to watch this film through to the end. It is slow and after about 20 minutes I felt I had seen it all. This is a pity as the black and white imagery that unfolded before my eyes was breathtakingly beautiful. But somehow I expect a movie to tell me a story, to get me involved in the character's lives in some way or other. In this aspect the movie really does fail miserably. It's just a big freak show. Too much style, hardly any substance.

The movie is based on a novel by Swiss writer Robert Walser. It was first published around 1910 and reads like excerpts of the author's diary. In their diaries people explore their selves and their relationship with the external world. I think the main problem with Instituten Benjamenta is its failure to distinguish between the external and the internal world – it's just one big stage with a kind of a waiting room atmosphere. That's very fashionable in Modern European Theatre of our days. It can also be very, very, boring. A much better introduction into Walser's world is Thomas Koerfer's movie Der Gehülfe.

No doubt the Brothers Quay are talented artists. Their movies live through the imagery, not from the narrative. This is ideal for music videos but maybe less so for a full length feature film.

it is really beautiful. fragile, cold and courageous. because it is little more than art film. or adaptation. it may be a dream fresco, a puzzle or a form of poem. it is special meeting with a delicate meeting front with profound world in which Expresionism art, Kafka lines, Surrealism and Oniric circles are frontiers of this work. crumbs of magic, dark questions confuse desires, memories from past for East European people and shadows of characters. and flavor of many nuances of acting. paper ash colors, gray feelings and strange forms of life. a parable about basic values and hole of emotions. version for a Gloomy Sunday and exploration of a trip without end.

The Brothers Quay continue to employ their unique style in their first feature film, except that this time around there are real people - not to mention dialog. Their first attempt at something half-way close to semi-normal turns out to be a visually excellent film, where images steal the show, while the plot (if there is one) remains known only to the Quay Brothers.

The "story" is very vague, and in that way this film reminds me of "Eraserhead" (though "Eraserhead" is even more abstract); also reminds me of Lynch's movie as far as the mood and the small amount of dialog is concerned. There are some very weird scenes here. And while watching "Eraserhead" is an intense experience, watching this film turns out to be rather relaxing at times. Additional viewings don't help much in clarifying things. Or maybe I'm just too dumb.

A difficult and dreamlike film that mixes elements of the period squalor and steam punk expressionism of an early David Lynch, with the archaic self-awareness of Guy Maddin at his most starkly referential. Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995) will surely repel just as many viewers as it excites; with its combination of slow, abstract, carefully composed black and white imagery and elliptical narrative structures filled with codes and ciphers managing to be both pretentious and fascinating in equal measures. At its best, the atmosphere is continually beguiling and often like nothing else we've ever experienced; with every single frame of this bizarre odyssey into the notions of fractured, nocturnal ambiance and closeted sensuality being tightly composed and beautiful to look at. However, at its worst, it is infuriatingly beyond comprehension; with the mood and the tone leading the film, almost like poetry, beyond the outdated notions of structure or momentum, and instead leaving us with a film that is overwhelming in its unique vision and design, but simply devoid of any sense of feeling or philosophy for an audience to fully grasp on to.

This isn't a flaw in itself, as cinema is ultimately beyond the trite notions of character and plot, but even then, a film should, in my mind at least, have the potential to make us think and feel. As with all great art there should be some idea attached to it; something that stands out and resonates either emotionally or intellectually (or both) that makes the process of viewing more rewarding on an entirely personal level. You have to really search for it here, and clearly, judging from the past reviews, my fellow commentators have also struggled to unearth any overall sense of meaning from the film's emptily cryptic images and emphasis on dreamlike atmospherics. If the point of the film was simply to conjure this world within the mind of the viewer, then the film is a great success; with the meandering, drifting as if sleepwalking tone of the film being both striking and evocative from the first frame until the last. That said, there's only so far we can go with lovingly choreographed sequences of dance and movement combined with the amazing use of editing and shot construction, which finds stories in even the most minor or mundane of actions, though sadly, nothing that would point to an overall theme or interpretation.

I suppose it is indicative of the directors' joint backgrounds in animation, or their fondness and appreciation for the films of Jan Švankmajer or Juraj Herz, with the emphasis placed on the look and feel of the film, rather than any kind of connection to the material. Or maybe there is and we just need to look deeper; to scratch beneath the surface and persevere with the free-flowing narrative, to see the clues that lurk beneath. Regardless of how you approach it - and with these particular "flaws" in mind - the film is still a fascinating work; with that atmosphere and somewhat Eastern European look and feel of the film being unrivalled, and again, unlike anything else we've ever experienced. Added to this, the central performances from Mark Rylance and Alice Krige are both exceptionally detailed, even within such an evasive and enigmatic construct. At any rate, Institute Benjamenta is certainly a difficult film to recommend, but an even more difficult one to dismiss; with the hints of the brothers' earlier, animated work - such as Street of Crocodiles (1986) and Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1988) drawing obvious parallels - and combining it with an approach that is memorable and purely cinematic.