A World of His Own

Mark Hogancamp may not consider himself an artist, but he certainly performs for the world in the lens of documentary filmmaker Jeff Malmberg. Populated with wonderful little vignettes brimming with exquisitely constructed play, [Marwencol] (currently playing after an extension at IFC Center) disappoints only when we find the edges of Hogancamp’s imagined world.

Marwencol opens by pairing of Hogancamp’s attack as he left a bar in hometown Kingston in April of 2000 (which left him comatose and psychologically damaged) with his infinitesimally detailed fictional WWII era town of Marwencol, Belgium, populated by the doll alter egos of his friends and family. The film provides a much-needed context for Hogancamp’s photographs [currently on view at Esopus Space] (through Oct. 28). Context that Hogancamp cannot achieve for himself. After the attack, Hogancamp lost not only his fine motor skills, but his memories. “My memories that I do get, they come back in stills. Just a single shot, but no context.”

The viewer experiences Marwencol through the same medium. Vintage songs accompany still montages of a visually bewitching but dramatically confusing world where witches save war heroes from evil SS agents by using homemade time machines and everybody always gets along, no matter what they wear. While his respective realities remain distinct for the viewer through Super 8 footage fantasy and duller DV quality life, Hogancamp intentionally melds life with fiction to create a better world for himself.

Hogancamp tells the story of his dolls in the first person. He narrates their lives with more feeling then he expresses reflecting on his failed marriage. The fictional Hogancamp occupies more cinematic space than the real, who is often fractured to pieces by the camera, limited to a single eye, or a shaking hand.

Hogancamp exists as a child for most of the film. He crawls about his town on hands and knees, loves “the idea of women,” and rejects a bank overdraw notice by stuffing it back into the mailbox. He sits on a well-worn couch, cross-legged and gleefully expressive, for some of his interviews. Watching him tuck his doll girlfriend Anna into a makeshift bed, turn out the light and whisper “I love you” is so utterly invasive it hurts. While Malmberg deftly handles the film’s tone and waits nearly an hour to casually reveal that Hogancamp is a cross dresser (the reason behind his attack), he cannot alleviate a general feeling of voyeurism.

“The thing that struck me immediately about Mark’s work is that there is no irony,” the editor of [Esopus Magazine] explains, “The work is him.” The film bares Hogancamp’s deepest fears and obsessions as those of a child. He worries that people “only see him on the outside.” It is simply heartbreaking and nearly unwatchable to see the doll Mark resort to building his own doll world to recover from being attacked by five SS agents. As Hogancamp’s best friend Bert explains, “This is Mark’s real war.” As viewers, we are merely bystanders as his therapeutic art stand trial in the public eye.

In the end, Marwencol is a fascinating portrait of a reinvented mind, rather than one of those all-American tales of triumph over adversity. Though we root like hell for Hogancamp to wear his high heels in public or find a real girlfriend, he makes little definitive progress. Malmberg must resort to clever structural devices and layers of visuals to manufacture an arcing plot line. Because, as Hogancamp explains in the final words of the film, “People out there are so real. I prefer to live in my world. I wanna live here, in Marwencol.”

Marwencol, directed by Jeff Malmberg, at the [IFC Center,] Runtime: 84 min.