QZ qz thoughts
a blog from Eli the Bearded

Marwencol


Marwencol at IMDB

This is a great little documentary about Mark Hogancamp's outsider art / self-therapy art. Mr Hogancamp was a drunk, and apparently a bit of an asshole when drunk, and was severely beaten just outside a bar in 2000. He spent nine days in a coma and then forty more days hospitalized recovering.

After a while the money for therapy ran out, but he was not fully recovered. Slowly he turned to art to work out his problems. Model making to help with his fine motor skills and story telling to help with the mental scars.

Marwencol is the name of the fictional Belgium town, built in 1/6th scale and set in a WWII era. The original population was mostly Barbies, but it slowly acquired more men, and some non-Barbie women.

A lot of the visuals are from still photos Mr Hogancamp took with him talking about the shots we are seeing. To say much about the shots would give away parts of the narrative. Suffice to say there is a fair amount of 1/6th scale violence and some 1/6th scale nudity.

Five out of five passengers in model jeep on a two mile walk to town.

Final thought: the SS had killed the original male population of Marwencol