Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life

1995 · Stephen Quay · Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life on Sightlines

Watch the chalk circle. The pupils trace it on the floor, the same arc again, and nothing comes of the tracing — no skill accrues, no examination waits at the far end, no door swings open onto the employment the school supposedly prepares them for. Jakob came to the Institute Benjamenta to learn to be a servant, and what he learns is how to repeat a gesture until it empties of purpose. This is the first thing to understand about the Quay Brothers' film: its people have lost the ability to act in the way movies had trained us to expect people to act.

Gilles Deleuze gave that loss a name. In the cinema he called classical, an image is a link in a chain — a character sees a situation, something stirs, and he acts to change it. Perception flows into action: the sensory-motor circuit. Deleuze called this the movement-image, and it is the grammar of nearly every chase, rescue, and showdown ever cut together. Institute Benjamenta runs on the opposite current. Jakob sees, and there is nothing to be done. The lessons lead nowhere. Lisa declines and he can only look. Deleuze's word for an image cut loose from action is the opsign — a pure optical situation (and here, with its amplified breath and scraped chalk, a sound situation too) in which a character 'has become a seer.' Mark Rylance's quiet, faintly ironic watchfulness is that seer: a man reduced to perceiving, registering the Institute the way you register a dream you cannot steer. Argue with me if you like — but try to name a single thing Jakob successfully does. He asks for a better room. That is the plot.

The rooms themselves complete the break. Nic Knowland shoots in a boxy, near-square Academy frame and a shallow focus that lets whole planes of the set dissolve into blur, so that a corridor or a schoolroom stops being a place where something will happen and becomes, instead, a state of mind. Deleuze called this an any-space-whatever — a space drained of its function as a setting for action, cut into disconnected affective fragments: a hand, a face, an antler, gold dust, the grain of worn wood, each isolated while the surrounding world melts. You cannot map the Institute. You can only feel its airlessness. And because the days are made indistinguishable — the same drills, the same liturgy of servility performed again — the film fills with what Deleuze called dead time: stretches where nothing advances, where the everyday is simply held until you feel its weight as duration rather than as the runway to an event.

What fills that suspended time is feeling without discharge. Alice Krige's Lisa is, at first, a glacial reflecting surface — the affection-image in its purest form, a face presented as a single held quality (control, contemplation) rather than as a person about to do something. Then the micro-tremors gather, the quality tips toward its threshold, and she slides into catatonia. Here is one of Deleuze's strangest figures: the world keeps moving — winter closes in, the academy drifts toward dissolution — while the human being grows still, absorbed, like a dancer swallowed by her own dance. Lisa does not decline because of events. She stills, and the season moves through her.

All of this is mirrored, literally. Glass and reflective surfaces recur, fracturing and doubling the figures until you cannot always tell the body from its image. This is Deleuze's crystal-image: present and reflection grown indistinguishable, the actual and its double exchanging places. And the crystal here is of a particular kind — an ordered, faintly aristocratic little world, with its siblings and its rituals and its whiff of incest, rotting quietly from inside. Crystal-decomposition: the institution is already a ruin pretending to be a school. Pressing up beneath the sterile discipline is something older and instinctual — the deer, the antlers, the half-glimpsed forest, an originary world of drives that the academy's chalk circles exist to keep at bay. The film never explains them. It lets them seep, like damp.

None of this is animation, and all of it is. The Quays spent a decade making Street of Crocodiles and its kin — rack focus drifting across screws and dust and dolls, miniature decaying worlds probed in macro. Their genuine invention here is to transplant that grammar whole into a feature with living actors, directing Rylance and Krige as if they were articulated puppets, somnambulant figures posed in tableau. The lineage is exact. From Caligari they take the somnambulist and the painted, anti-naturalistic stage; from Dreyer's Vampyr, the gauzy low-contrast haze that dissolves all spatial certainty; from Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, the looping repetition-structure that builds dream-logic instead of plot; from Lynch's Eraserhead, the enveloping bed of designed sound doing the narrative work that dialogue refuses. Švankmajer's tactile object-animation taught them to make a pine cone carry as much weight as a line.

What did it do to film as an art? It proved that the optical language of handmade stop-motion — its lenses, its tactility, its loving attention to surfaces — could sustain a feature-length time-image, a movie in which servility itself, the longing to become 'a charming, utterly round zero,' becomes a legitimate cinematic subject. Most films about institutions show you the rebellion. This one shows you the wish to disappear inside the rule, and films it so that the wish becomes beautiful. Watch the chalk circle again. It is going nowhere, exquisitely.

Concepts in play

pure optical & sound situations — Jakob can only watch the lessons lead nowhere and Lisa decline; amplified breath and scraped chalk make a sound situation with no action available.
voyant — Rylance's watchful, faintly ironic stillness — a man reduced to perceiving who never successfully acts (his one initiative: asking for a better room).
any-space-whatever (disconnection) — Knowland's shallow focus dissolves planes of the set into blur, isolating a hand, a face, an antler, so corridors become states of mind rather than mappable settings.
temps mort — The same drills and liturgy of servility repeated; days made indistinguishable so duration is felt for itself rather than as a runway to events.
movement of the world — Lisa grows still toward catatonia while winter closes in and the academy drifts to dissolution — the world moving through a stilled body, like a dancer absorbed by the dance.
hyalosign — Recurring glass, mirrors, and reflective surfaces fracture and double the figures until body and image become indistinguishable.
crystal-decomposition — The ordered, faintly aristocratic sibling-run academy, with its whiff of incest and its rituals, rotting from within and drifting toward dissolution — already a ruin pretending to be a school.
originary world — The deer, antlers, and half-glimpsed forest — an instinctual fairy-tale order of drives pressing up beneath the academy's sterile chalk-circle discipline.

How Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life was received →