Street of Crocodiles, 1986. Courtesy of Suzanne Buchan.	The Institute Benjamenta, 1995. © Zeitgeist Films.

The Institute Benjamenta was shot in black and white, enabling the subtlety of chiaroscuro, an animated choreography of light and stark graphics to disorient, capture and enchant audiences. The few animated scenes within the film are isolated interludes, expressions of subjective vision and poetic metaphor. They contribute to the dream-like quality of a film which, as in their animated films, is uncannily freed of laws of time and space. This and future live-action projects are by no means an indication of a move away from animation: the Brothers Quay intend to explore the potential which slumbers in the combination of these cinematic techniques. The formal possibilities inherent in animation are essential to the dream, inner vision and narrative meandering so essential to their cinematic transformations of text, poetry and imagination.

A Dreamlike Voyage
Carl Orff's music and a spoken riddle are the aural foreshadowing which accompany the film's exquisite, stylized opening credits. At dusk, a small man approaches a door, pulls at his heavily starched, blindingly white collar and hesitantly knocks. Jakob von Gunten (Mark Rylance), a thirtyish, delicate man who "wants to be of use to someone in this life" enters the Institute Benjamenta, a school for domestics, and embarks on a dreamlike voyage through an eerie, metaphysical fairy tale world.

Assisted by her devoted and enigmatic model student Kraus (Daniel Smith), doe-eyed Fraulein Lisa Benjamenta (Alice Kriege) runs the institute with her brother Herr Benjamenta (Gottfried John), guiding her students through a lesson which is always the same, "Practice-scenes-from-life"; mechanical repetition, self-castigation, monotony and submission. It is a curriculum of cryptic signs, absurd gestures and unbearable detail. Jakob's arrival awakes in Herr Benjamenta a haunting hope of a Savior, with discrete homoerotic undertones.

The fragmented, dark and obscure relationship between brother and sister and Kraus climaxes in Lisa's decision to stop living; she is "dying from those who could have seen and held me ... dying from the emptiness of cautious and clever people." Jakob stirs Lisa from a loveless existence, causing a horrific recognition of something unspeakable which gnaws at her until she can no longer bear it. After a confession to Jakob sealed with a fleeting brush of her lips on his, she expires. On her bier, like Snow White mourned by her dwarfs, her brother bent over her in grief, Lisa's eyes open and sparkle darkly into the camera. Jakob and Herr Benjamenta leave the Institute, but Kraus remains behind. Guardian of the fish bowl, the riddle and the sleeping beauty, Kraus is the constancy who seems to guarantee that rituals and fossils like the Institute will never fully expire.

A terrifying sense of the sublime simultaneously haunts and mystifies the Institute and its inhabitants. In isolation, the film's visual leitmotifs and iconography are exquisite: totemistic cloven hoofs, deer antlers, flowing waters; in their sublimation and appropriation in a world of suppressed Victorian eroticism, they become obsessive, dark and ambiguous. School mistress Lisa Benjamenta's cane, with which she guides and masters her students, is tipped with a tiny hoof (initially the Quays thought to give her cloven shoes); Herr Benjamenta's foot is seen hoofed, and in a disturbing moment we see him rutting in front of a steam-streaked mirror, a majestic set of antlers in his arms.