Marwencol (2010)

February 28, 2018 10:58 PM

After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside of a bar, Mark Hogancamp came back to the world traumatized and unable to remember much of his own past. To help process what happened to him, Hogancamp built “Marwencol”: a ¹⁄₆^th scale World War II-era Belgian town populated by dolls representing himself, his friends, and family, and began creating photo-essays about the town. This documentary explores the attack, Hogancamp’s life and work, and his eventual discovery by the art world.
posted by Going To Maine (2 comments total)

The last two minutes of this movie made me so damn happy.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:59 PM on February 28, 2018

(Which, to be clear, I don't want to take away from the real trauma of the film, or the fact that the art show wasn't the triumphant come-out-of-the-closet moment we hoped for, or that building a marwencol inside marwencol might just be an infinite recursion and sign that this entire thing is an inescapable spiral. It just seemed so wonderful, and so perfectly logical: to care for himself-in-miniature the way he has cared for himself.)
posted by Going To Maine at 12:15 AM on March 1, 2018