Marwencol

I watched an INCREDIBLE documentary today. It was called Marwencol, made by Jeff Malmberg in 2010. Link above is the presskit with some pictures.

After a brutal beating by 5 men, coma and recovery after doctors rebuilt his face, Mark Hogencamp, an upstate New Yorker, was forced to make his own therapy when the money ran out... and the therapy he came up with is wonderful, and for him healing, art! He has built a whole little town, a model of a WWII town in Belgium, complete with American soldiers, of which his "self" there is one, modelled by what look like Action Men, Barbies and other dolls. He even has SS troopers in the cast. There are buildings, trucks, a bar, homes and streets. The film takes us to visit the model store where he buys much of what he uses, right down to miniature guns with removable clips, dolls with authentic uniforms, the correct model of trucks.

As do many Simmers (see previous post), he prefers the props to look "used" or "aged" - no plastic fresh-from-the-factory items for him, all look used, dusty, a touch grimy, as you would expect in a little, isolated town impoverished by war. He takes long walks along country roads with a model jeep, as you might walk a dog, the jeep on a long stick instead of a lead, and carrying four of his favourite characters - in order to wear down the tyres to a realistic point. He tells us that this jeep has travelled 180 miles - which scaled to his model world is 1800 miles. At this point you start to realise just how disabled he is as he explains that he has to look at his feet and follow the white line along the road edge to ensure he doesn't fall over or wander into the middle of the road.

Some of the scenes he has built and photographed are of brutal beatings, and you, the viewer, see how he has gradually come to terms with his own mistreatment. The beaten characters are always damaged in the head - as he was - their faces stamped and kicked to the point where there is little face left, covered in blood on the head, scarred across the right eye as he was*.

He uses Marwencol and its inhabitants to stage everyday life and scenes which seem to be almost conscious recreations of his own beatings, with sometimes an element of fantasy (for example, when his own character, Captain Hogencamp, captured and beaten almost to death by 5 SS guys, is rescued just before death by "the Belgian Witch" (slightly anime-looking doll with luminous blue hair) in her time machine - which he made ingeniously from the box of an old VSR that he says ingenuously "ate one of my best porno tapes". He takes very good photographs of them and the film finishes with his exhibition of his work, both some of the models and photographs in a Greenwich Village gallery.

As part of his healing process he has had to come to terms with the person he was before his beating and his model character has to face this too. (We see him with a cupboard full of women's style shoes - which he has been told that he liked to wear. This is something he does not remember at all, and he takes it on board as calmly as everything else, dealing with it stoically by having Captain Hogancamp in one of his scenes showing a pair of stiletto heeled shoes to the other characters). He was also, before the assault, a fine graphic artist; we are shown a few of his drawings, still with a WWII theme, which are worthy of the great comic-book artists.

As I have said before, I love model towns - and this film is truly astonishing. No, this MAN is astonishing!

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*I do wonder if that part of the brain has anything to do with drawing ability. I know another person, my RL husband, who had brain damage in the area of the right eye and went from being a talented artist to not being able to draw at all.