Institute Benjamenta, The Quay Brothers

Institute Benjamenta: Or This Dream People Call Human Life is the striking first live-action feature from master animators, the Quay Brothers. The film stars Mark Rylance, currently performing in West End play La Bete, and Alice Krige, soon to be seen in Disney’s summer blockbuster The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Jakob (Mark Rylance) wants to be of service. Admitted to a peculiar school for servants run by domineering Johannes (Gottfried John) and his sorrowful sister Lisa (Alice Krige), and perplexed at first by his often-absurd new surroundings, Jakob gradually uncovers the mystical Institute’s secrets and, by extension, those of life itself.

The Quays’ visionary style, stunning monochrome photography by Nic Knowland and Larry Sider’s rich soundscapes breathe life into every corner of this fragile world, which shimmers with repressed energy and hypnotic beauty.

The film is presented with a variety of extra features including a new documentary exploring the making of the film through interviews with the Quay Brothers, Mark Rylance, Alice Krige and principle crew, and four other short films. The DVD is one of the first three releases in the BFI’s new Dual Format Edition package (containing both a Blu-ray and DVD disc).

Competition: We have three copies of Institute Benjamenta to give away, courtesy of the BFI. To win yourself one of these dual format edition DVDs, simply answer this question – which Quay Brothers film was made in response to the medical collection of Sir Henry Wellcome? Email your answer to engine@animateprojects.org by 19 August to be in with a chance to win. Three winners will be selected at random after the deadline.

We recently caught up for a chat with The Quay Brothers – read the interview here…

Institute Benjamenta, The Quay Brothers

The brothers talk to Gary Thomas about their work, collaboration, Europe and the Baroque. Institute Benjamenta (1995), their first feature, is available now in a Dual Format Edition package from the BFI. It includes a new documentary, with interviews with the Quays, Mark Rylance, Alice Krige and other principle cast and crew, as well as three short films and a booklet of newly commissions essays and notes. (To win a copy visit our competition).

I’ve found it hard to think of questions to ask, partly because I don’t really want to ask you about the work! Because, well… the work is the work. How do you feel about talking about your work?

When it comes to the animation there’s that whole artisanal side to it where you work with your hands all the time. So that’s one aspect which is really so pleasurable to talk about, about how so much discovery gets made is in the process of finding the grammar for whatever film it is that you are making. You’re looking for a way of liberating the film through an artisanal technique.

And that’s a long process because you want to find something that’s going to take you by the nose and really pull you and challenge. It’s a lot of false starts, which are inevitable, but after a while it’s like one of us starts on the left one and the other starts on the right and we sort of gravitate towards the flow and then we’re off: then everything sort of falls into place.

Well, that’s the grammar in the process of making the work. But after the work is made how happy are you when people ask you to articulate or put into language something that exists in a wordless different language?

Well, the other day we read a comment on something we’d said – how it was incredibly shallow! So you go, “Mmm.. it’s best just to shut up and let the work try to speak for itself.”

As in a piece like In Absentia, it’s almost a semi-documentary, a portrait but an imagined portrait. The start is a documentary situation, of a woman incarcerated in an asylum, who wrote these amazing letters, that look almost like Braille. So there is this evidence, the hard fact of these letters, and a photograph of her and there’s a couple of lines and it says schizophrenia.

But after that we invent it. And it’s a psychological portrait, but there’s the great given – Stockhausen – the music that the film is grounded on. It became the secret scenario on to which we mapped the visual realm.

So to talk about that – we can just lay that out – saying what the starting point was, that Stockhausen was a given. How we’d always known the work and it was always in the back of our mind but then suddenly we just conjugated the two and said this will go well with this.

Finding that small piece of text – a documentary fact – is that often a starting point?

Invariably it will be a piece of music that will be the strongest starting point. Of course, we’ll have a scenario in mind but the next bit is going for the music almost. It’s trying to find something that will now extend things, what will make that theme sail?

For us, if the music can illuminate it then only music can do that, rather than, say, to write a text or a voiceover or something.

With Street of Crocodiles you start with an existing, and in your dance works starting with existing choreography, at what point does the work then become ‘yours’?

Well, the ballets had already been choreographed by Will Tuckett and we observed and created a scenography around that observation. Watching them and saying we propose this is what we could do, so we came on later. Although after doing the Duet with Will, with The Sandman we decided to push and do a broader scenario – and we chose the Hoffman, and all worked on it together – so really created it from the ground up.

What about collaboration? You are so distinctive as artists and yet you often work collaboratively, which surely demands a generosity of spirit, if not compromise. Is that something you’ve embraced and enjoy doing?

With theatre and opera and particularly dance, we’re in the hands of people we truly admire, but it’s not a case of collaborating in the animation films as it’s only the two of us, maybe a third person occasionally comes in to do certain things.

But even there, there’s a kind of collaboration with the existing texts.

But I think we always find a text that has a space. It’s like Sarah Connolly talking about Shakespeare – you have fifty-five people tramping up a giant ski slope and the ice becomes so packed with everybody’s interpretation that you can never get in.

We always think about what we could we add to something. Our natural bent is to go towards the margins and the footnotes and to open up. With Institute Benjamenta, we saw an article on Walser entitled Portrait of a Nobody and immediately you’re intrigued and it opened up his world for us. With Street of Crocodiles, Schultz is well known in Poland but he wasn’t so well known here – but again it was like the material had that density – and you think, this is very challenging and maybe it will push us in a way that we haven’t worked before. Walser opened up a rear door to us on how to approach the fairytale. Where all we’d seen was this big bright front door, to which you didn’t want a key. We’re going way around the back…and Walser’s left the door ajar.

Working with Richard Jones on a couple of theatre and opera pieces was truly a revelation for us too – being invited into a collaboration where we saw the power of really collaborative work, and it’s what we used when we did Benjamenta. We based it off how Richard worked. You have the team as it were; costume designer, set designer, music and the director and the conductors. That’s your cell of activity and with Benjamenta we went out to achieve precisely that. We hand-chose the people that we thought could really contribute towards the production.

And with Institute Benjamenta there are the actors. That Hitchcock line about how actors are cattle, did you see actors as puppets? Was it the first time you’d worked with actors?

In The Comb we worked with a dancer, but she was mostly on her back and we just told her to “breathe slower, breathe slower”, that was it! Obviously I kept using the word please!

But I knew that it was true that with the puppets we were always imposing the performance. No matter what they do, it’s us imposing that performance, whilst with the actors we understood immediately that we had invited them to contribute. We gave them a framework. They read the scenario and of course they came at it with a certain approach. And they were very happy to be able to improvise on set, and that we gave them that liberty. Though it was a very tight framework – we had a six-week shoot so it had to be quite focused – they pretty much came with their character formed and we spent a lot of time talking with them, but there was still a lot of liberty…

I guess it’s not improvisation exactly…

It’s actually discovery -

…there’s more than one way to tap a stick. What’s the right way?

Exactly. A little less was invariably the thing, but we were surprised that that meant they were so focused right away. And we just captured them – trapped the performance.

And isn’t it like what you were saying about Richard Jones? They’re there because you’ve invited them. Mark Rylance and Alice Krige are very particular actors and they’re there because you asked them to be there.

And somebody like Gottfried was just such a professional. Sort of quite an inspiring and formidable character but he was just… nothing he did was wrong.

To go right back, you’re from America, Philadelphia. The state of cream cheese and Grace Kelly. Then in 1969, a particular cultural social moment, you come to London, you study at the Royal College of Art and you stay. What was that 50s American childhood like?

We were the perfect boy scouts! We were Eagle scouts; we had all the merit badges, all of the arrows, and we sweated with obedience. And I think that gave us a certain chance to explode when we came to Europe. I don’t mean explode like drugs or things that. We didn’t smoke and we didn’t drink until we were twenty-one.

So you weren’t escaping, though you found something when you got here?

I think what we discovered when we went to the Philadelphia College of Art was cinema. Bergman, Tarkovsky, Buñuel and then the Czech New Wave. The 60s and the Nouvelle Vague – it was all playing in some of the art cinemas in Philly. We discovered literature and opera and music and so we had a real taste for Europe but it was second hand – it was always by cinema. It was what you could get your hands on in America.

So we went to London and said well, now we’re at the gateway of Europe and we just have to cross the Channel. It was really that London potentially gave us that European possibility.

I was going to ask, was it London, England or Europe?

It was finding Europe in London, as we had found Europe in Philadelphia, which was a city with a lot of ethnic communities, though they were kind of diluted. The Poles hardly spoke Polish any more. Ukrainians, Irish, Italians were there, but everybody was dying to be more American than the Americans, so that they’d all lost their languages. We always thought that was a bit sad. In a sense, coming to Europe was looking at every one of those cultures and thinking, where did it come from? What were they fleeing from and what was still left in Europe. It intrigued us.

You’ve sustained an investigation into this idea of Europe, and it seems to be something that drives through all your work – I mean commercial work – as well.

Yes it does. We’re both readers, we love researching and going into the library. And I think what happened early on was that you’d see a footnote at the bottom of a page that would open up really amazing chapters. Things that are really on the margins but merit attention. It’s exploring the hinterlands of what’s been abolished to the edges, but which can then spiral out. So instead of doing something on say, traditional perspective, it was like we had discovered anamorphosis.

There’s an old photo of you both wearing sunglasses.

That was when we were in Amsterdam, so 1977 or 78. I used to have the tan when we had just come over to do Nocturna and we met Peter Greenaway there at the BFI.

It’s not a typical image of you, but you are looking extremely cool! It made me think about how you’re perceived. You’re twins, and there’s that mystery and mystique about people who are twins. And you create these create worlds. You must seclude yourselves to an extent when you work – as all animators do – but in person, you’re very open. How do you see yourselves?

Well, as twins when we went to art school we each did our own artwork, but with film, there was only scope to make one film, so that pulled us together.

I don’t think we wanted two films anyway. Film brought us really together and you couldn’t have had two people who could work together more naturally. We don’t have to convince each other. We know the lay of the land and it is sort of an inner language, just a nod and a wink and you’re off. And there’s no ego involved, because you’ve abolished ego for the sake of the film.

Animation taught us to learn all the metiers within the animation realm: how to animate,  how to build things, how to light them, how to edit. And that allows you to discover a language, because you’re not asking somebody else to tell you how to do that, you don’t need an interpreter to fit out our vision.

But is there a division of skills or labour along the way?

Inevitably because you don’t want to both be at the editing table, so one can be editing while the other is starting to set up the next shot. So you play…it’s a gravitation thing…

Gravitational or interchangeable?

Well it’s interchangeable in the context of building or making the puppets or the architecture. That we do equally.

We’ve sort of done a little bit of a separation – editing, for example – but it was sort of instinctive.

Who’s the elder?

It goes by in the West the one who comes out first: so me by seven minutes. But in China it’s the one who stays in the womb the longest is the oldest.

You made a short film for Comme des Garcons, for their Wonderwood perfume, and I read how you were spraying it all the time you were watching the film!

I think somebody misinterpreted what we’d said and we played along with it!.

There’s this pulsating and breathing in the film. And like your other films, there’s a lot of suspense where the viewer almost holds their breath… It made me wonder how that tension comes from not just the striking images, but editing and constructing.

The true filter is how you adapt or how you filter the editing through the music. I think that’s what is the most important thing. It’s making those first few steps. You find the language for the music in the editing. Or the editing is discovered, is illuminated by the music.

The music isn’t always there is it?

Always. Except Gilgamesh, the only one that we didn’t have the music first.

But the construction of music and the editing of a film are different things so is it a kind of counterpoint?

Well it’s counterpoint but it’s also hand in glove I think. At times you run with the music and at other times you can pull away from it. I remember when we did the original Punch and Judy with Harrison Birtwistle,  and we came to a point where we said, we’ve got to turn the set in something like nine frames and we said it’s going to look ludicrous. But with the music it worked because in one chord you could get away with a nine-frame move that we said up to this point without music at all would be ludicrous.

But with Harrison Birtwistle,  Stockhausen, this isn’t toccata and fugue that you’re  editing to.

It’s very dynamic, very rich. We’ve gone for different kinds of music and with Wonderwood we knew it would be that piece of music. We knew that that would discover the notion of – the rhythm of wood – within the scenario that we were applying to it. But it is pretty instinctive. We are always looking for a mistake to liberate something or to find that, ‘Ahh, that actually works, that mistake there’.

And I think too with the editing, because we tend to edit as we’re actually shooting – we’re laying in and seeing it build. We don’t shoot everything and then edit it at the end of the 15 week shoot. It’s always been simultaneous and that allows you relook, again and again, and to say, am I getting used to it or is it easing, or do we need a few more frames in there or is that too fast?

So, what about digital? You’ve worked so much with celluloid, but you’re using digital technologies. In Wonderwood there is that pulsating – that’s digital, isn’t it?

Is there pulsating? You think there is a breathing feel to it or something?

The pine fir cone pulses.

Oh yes. It was something we discovered by accident but this is a genuine stylisation that actually feels organic with the actual substance, with the organic pine cones and the actual things we were using.

But the way the actual sequence works is that we sprayed the pine cone with water. Then of course what happens is that when we’re turning over, the leaves open up on the pine cone, so there was both a genuine movement within the pine cone itself plus another one we overlaid on top of it.

It seems to me that you’re happy to take from digital what it offers and that there are things you can only do with digital.

We’ve embraced it pretty seriously. We realise that to have this digital technology is like having a laboratory in our own house. With 35mm we were dependent on getting rushes and coming back, looking at it, and saying reshoot.

And then there’s the waiting or never having the budget to do a little bit of post on it. Now, with After Effects or things like that we can actually be doing quite a bit of very subtle things here. We don’t lay it on with a trowel. There are little discoveries and it’s been really fantastic what the equipment can do.

So we’re sitting here in Atelier Koninck. Has it always been here?

25 years in this place.

Interviewers always seem to comment on how it’s a decade, or more than a decade between features, as if you’re not doing anything again in the meantime. But you have kept yourselves busy!

The features have always come at the right moment, and the deals in getting them financed seemed to be the right thing to have happened to us, and in the meantime we were still doing opera, theatre and short films. And in the back of our mind, was the idea that they weren’t going to happen; we gave full energy towards working on them but always knowing – with people making it known – that they could fall out at any second.

Baroque, rococo, or gothic?

Baroque absolutely without a doubt. Rococo is a permutation of the baroque I think. It spirals too far, it tips over, it goes a little too far.

It’s in the architecture. Rather than painting, it was always baroque architecture – church architecture in southern Germany – that most impressed us. It was making the quality of stone feel like lighter, with the adventure of light coming through, how it diffused the stone and gave it that lightness.

So when we did Benjamenta, the quality of light and the way it entered into the Institute had a very strong feel that came from some of the great baroque architecture. We’d seen books, but it was a journey in Southern Bavaria that really knocked us out and blew us away: to physically be in the space. It’s one thing to look at it on a page and go wow that’s amazing, but suddenly to actually traverse, move your eyes and move your body physically through that space was quite extraordinary.

But that’s minimal Protestant work – there’s a Catholicism about your aesthetic isn’t there?

Yes I know totally. We grew up as real Protestants.

You’re Amish!?

Almost! We’re from close to them, but it was the use of space that broke it, and it wasn’t Protestant architecture, it was the Catholic, the Bavarian, that deeply hit us.

You mentioned tipping over – and there’s that line between doing something ‘knowing’ on the one side, and then camp, kitsch and excess on the other. You do tread the line appropriately. There’s an exquisite beauty, a lustre that doesn’t tip over. Is that instinctive or is it a struggle or something you’re mindful of?

It’s more instinctive, but there is a natural modesty and austerity that we do. Carl Dreyer helped. Seeing his work modifies the way you think and how you want to work. You like to see him perched on your shoulder when you’re looking at that baroque church and think, “What is it that you admire?”

Because there’s a side to Dreyer’s work that fundamentally informed us. What he did in cinema, the austerity of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Ordet, and Day of Wrath, which is almost baroque in the richness of light.

The BFI have released the Institute Benjamenta DVD, and I wondered about looking back and what it’s like to look at a work 15 years later?

It’s like looking back at any of the works. You know the scenes that you think that you could have done better or that you should have cut that or tightened it up. And then the other ones where you’re very happy, that worked, that that really came together beautifully.

And where all the elements, the people, the time, came together in six brief weeks and you created something that really flowed. Whereas in Piano Tuner, things just jammed and got stuck. So now with the third feature in the works – Sanatorium – we want to go back to what we discovered in the freedom that we had in Benjamenta. We have to nurture the circumstances that surrounded Benjamenta.

It was low budget, nobody was looking, and everybody left us alone and that was so wonderful and there were no expectations. Then with Piano Tuner everybody was looking and there were lots of expectations, and a lot more money, and a lot more people perched all over my shoulder looking around and that really was bad. It didn’t work.

And what is Sanatorium?

It’s another Bruno Schultz. It’s 40 pages long, and we enlarged it and brought in other Schultzian elements.

And what else are you working on?

In August we’ll be filming at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. It’s a pathological museum a bit like The Phantom Museum,  which they knew. The director approached us last year in Philadelphia when our exhibition Dormatorium was showing and asked if we’d consider doing something. We said yes, we knew the Museum from when we were at art school at Philadelphia. t’s a great museum – very fabulous and some really dark material in there – but then it was very dour and grim.

It’s not anymore?

We’ll go back and dress it down again!

Institute Benjamenta, The Quay Brothers

Or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995) is a darkly beautiful and unsettling feature by The Quay Brothers starring Mark Rylance and Alice Krige. Institute Benjamenta is one of the first three releases in the BFI’s new Dual Format Edition package, containing both a DVD and Blu-ray disc.

This striking first live-action feature from the master animators is a beautifully-realised anti-fairy tale, adapted from Jakob von Gunten, a novel by Swiss writer Robert Walser. The Quays’ visionary style, stunning monochrome photography by Nic Knowland and Larry Sider’s rich soundscapes breathe life into every corner of a fragile world, which shimmers with repressed energy and hypnotic beauty.

Click here for information about how to buy a copy.