Institute Benjamenta
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Director: Timothy Quay, Stephen Quay
1995 / 105min / 35mm
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life
Timothy and Stephen Quays’ first live-action feature, a free adaptation of Jakob von Gunten, the 1909 Bildungsroman by Swiss author Robert Walser, is a troubling work of oneiric cinema that garnered comparisons to early David Lynch. A young Mark Rylance plays Jakob who, newly arrived at a school for servants run by siblings Johannes and Lisa Benjamenta (Gottfried John and Alice Krige), revolts against a curriculum that teaches total bowing and scraping self-abnegation, a rebellion that eventually leads him to odd erotic entanglements and the tangled catacombs underneath the Institute… “A luxuriant, uncanny evensong that itches like a decomposing sweater… Every cranny is soft with autumnal rot and dead-factory dust. Shooting in the silveriest black-and-white, the Quays break movie rules by the fistful, demanding we experience the film as a mood.”—SPIN
Distributor: Park Circus
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