Recent Film: Marwencol (2010)

April 18, 2011 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There are stories of people awakening from horrifying head injuries and being able to speak languages that they never knew before. Perhaps these tales are urban legends, but that’s not the case with Mark Hogancamp, the subject of Jeff Malmberg’s amazing documentary, who learned to communicate in a whole new way after barely surviving a savage beating.

Hogancamp was a gifted amateur artist and raging alcoholic who loved women–and wearing their clothes. One night about a decade ago he drunkenly acknowledged to a group of young men in an upstate New York bar that he was a cross-dresser and they battered him into a nine-day coma and caused massive brain damage and memory loss. Medicare cruelly cut Hogancamp off long before his recovery was complete, so he had to create his own therapy.

With hands now unsteady, drawing was no longer possible. So Hogancamp collected junk and made small purchases at the local hobby shop and worked meticulously to create an elaborate hyperrealistic scale version of a fantasy WWII-era Belgian town, called Marwencol, with characters based on himself, his relatives, his friends and his attackers. Into this tableaux he introduced narratives that allowed him to jog his memory and run through his tortured feelings about his victimization. Hogancamp took thousands of photographs of his sprawling installation and serendipitously became a celebrated outsider artist.

Perhaps what’s most interesting is seeing the stunning ways the human brain can compensate for such devastation, not able to completely restore what’s been lost but activating new pathways that have never been utilized before. Marwencol isn’t a simple, life-affirming film. It acknowledges all the rage that still seethes within the artist, but it is an amazing tale of perseverance. Somehow Hogancamp took the loose threads of his memories and weaved a rich tapestry, created something from nothing when nothing was all that seemed to be left inside his head.•

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