The Brothers Quay are brilliant artists whose body of work, both their puppet films and live action feature Institute Benjamenta, stands as one of the great achievements in cinema. While their new piece In Absentia does not ultimately compare to past masterpieces such as Street of Crocodiles and Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, it's still a remarkable film that will move the viewer with its hermetic beauty.
A combination of live action and puppet animation, In Absentia details the attempts of a woman to write a letter from within the cracked, faded walls of an asylum, her progress as glacially slow as the movement of the stars. She is doomed to endlessly repeat the steps and be forever left speechless in her cell, while outside a wasteland of waring light and dark reflects her despair.
With a gorgeous score by K. Stockhausen, the film at times feels ever so slightly music video-esque, and one wonders if without the well regarded composer's music it would fall apart rather quickly. But although a lesser work, it is still a fascinating and moving one.
Plot summary
A woman sits alone on a chair at a table in a room on one of the top floors of an asylum. Bright spot lights dot the night, sometimes shining on her window. She sharpens pencils and writes on a page in a copy book. The pencil point often breaks under her fingers' force. She places broken points outside the window on the sill. A satanic figure is somewhere nearby, animated but of straw or clay, not flesh. She finishes her writing, tears the paper from the pad, folds it, places it in an envelope, and slips it through a slot. Is she writing to her husband? "Sweetheart, come." Written by
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
February 08, 2016 at 03:51 PM
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another haunting work from the Quays
A strangely beautiful abstract calligraphy of psychosis.
By far one of the Quay Brothers' most haunting works, 'In Absentia'
depicts the suffering of a late nineteenth/early twentieth century
mental asylum patient, Emma Hauck, who would write letters to her
husband by pencil over and over on the same piece of paper, until the
sheet resembled a strangely beautiful abstract calligraphy of psychosis
-- an unintentional work of art. That the letters' sense of hopeless,
desperate scrawling depicts an eternal reaching into the void for her
husband to rescue her from herself -- a relief that could never arrive
-- is chilling.
The use of light in the black and white film is exquisite, flashing
like lightning or electrical charges -- as if Hauck's overheating and
tortured brain were illuminating secrets in the darkness that sanity
seeks to hide from us for our own preservation. The repetition of the
breaking pencil represents the 'brokenness' and futility of her own
mind, which is trapped in a hopeless cycle.
Karlheinz Stockhausen composed the music for 'In Absentia', creating
the ideal musique concrète score of ambient voices, rupture, madness
and unreality. Stockhausen, who was reduced to tears when viewing the
film, being reminded of his mother who was exterminated by the Nazis,
suggested that, in a role reversal, he had written the images and the
Brothers Quay had created the music.
The dress worn by Alice Krige's neurotic headmistress who suffers a
breakdown and dies in the Quay Brothers' 1995 film 'Institute
Benjamenta' returns in this film, in a suggestion of psychological
continuity.
Extremely experimental
"In Absentia" is a 19-minute black-and-white short film and even if it is already 15 years old, it is one of the later works of the Quay Brothers. What you hear and what you see in here, but especially hear, will not be congruent or make any sense whatsoever, but it is a film that has the intention to evoke certain thoughts and feelings in you that you will not have while watching "normal" films. This is also an accurate description for most of the Quay's other projects. I personally did not enjoy watching this experimental film too much. I have seen some of their other works and I find them (slightly) superior. However, I must say I am not a big fan of experimental movies and maybe that is why this one here (just like most of their other works) didn't do too much for me really. As a whole, i do not recommend the watch unless you really love this very specific genre.