5/5 There is a sense of humor.
  by Trevor L. Charles
This film is more Kafka than Kafka. The film opens with a stellar monochromatic shot of forks as a narrator recites a german poem. From there it's, "hold on to your beret"! As someone who loves this film, and has watched it repeatedly I would recommend three viewings. The first time you see this you may very well fall asleep. Not because of any fault of the film, but because it is the most dreamlike cinematic experience I have ever encountered. At least one other viewing is required to truely take in the beauty of the imagery. And then another to at last take in the amazing dialogue. There are many scenes that are ridiculous, and have a profound sense of humor. Especially when Herr Benjamenta pleads over dramatically, "will you be my...Confidon", it still gives me a chuckle just thinking about it. But other meditations and insights by Jakob have a soft lingering truth to them...

"There is but one lesson here, endlessly repeated."

5/5 brilliance
  by echoes of empires (San Francisco, CA USA)
Institute Benjamenta is a brilliant brew of dream, N.European myth, Buddhist philsophy, and emotional repression and longing, and asks us what it means to exist in a world. It's mesmerizing in dark-toned black and white, full of rich textures and fascinating camerawork, often coming across as a film and story from 100 years ago. Maybe unsurprisingly; it's based on the German novel Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser (who was possibly mad), written in 1908, though for the Quays this is only a jumping off point. It also seems to pay homage to Bruno Schultz, who mined similar literary territory in Poland some thirty years later. The film asks other questions - who saves, and who is saved? What is nihilism and what is freedom? And it has plenty of strange and subtle humor as well. The music, by Lech Jankowski, is great - somber cellos here, free jazz explosions there, broad humor ensembles here, medieval psalms there.
Rylance, Krige, and John excel in their roles as humiliated nobody (and anti-hero), haunted longing headmistress, and passionate crazed headmaster. The students in Walser's novel were actually youngsters, and the Quays smartly transpose them into the childishness of adult pupils, which gives the movie yet another layer of meaning. The actors who portray them also do a great job... A tremendous meditation full of symbolism and craft that becomes richer with repeated viewings.



5/5 Enter... and be astound...
  by yorgos dalman (Holland, Europe)
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.


4/5 Place That Fork
  by Stephen Kramer (Boise, ID USA)
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.

5/5 The very best I ever saw
  by H. Mueller (Wuppertal, Germany)
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!