Welcome To Marwencol

A Figure Perspective

Welcome To Marwencol
by Mark Hogancamp & Chris Shellen
Princeton Architectural Press ISBN: 9781616894153

Welcome To Marwencol is a beautiful book that I was given by somebody special in my life for Christmas. It’s a gorgeous tome telling the story of artist Mark Hogancamp and highlighting some of his photographic work after he recreated himself in the wake of an almost life ending event. If any of this is ringing any bells then you should take a look at the movie about this guy, where he is played by Steve Carell, called Welcome To Marwen, which I reviewed last year here (and which ranked quite highly in my end of year films list). There’s also a documentary film about him called Marwencol which I will need to catch up to at some point soon.

Like many biopics, the Steve Carrel movie made a fair few minor changes to the truth of the situation and this book, which showcases Hogancamp’s work, seems somehow more up to date (even though it preceded the Hollywood biopic). It’s also a fairly depressing story and it goes something like this.

Ex navy man, illustrator and alcoholic Mark Hogancamp was in a bar one night when he admitted to somebody in there that he was a cross dresser. As he was leaving the bar, the guy he’d been talking to and several of his friends jumped Hogancamp and gave him a seriously life threatening beating which he almost didn’t survive. He was placed in an induced coma for quite some time because the injuries were so awful as his face was peeled back and the doctors gave him a prosthetic eye socket to replace the one which had caved in. When he awoke, he managed to recover enough to be able to speak and move about again but he has no memories of his life before the beating. However, from what he could learn of it, he has tried to improve his outlook on life from what it was... including giving up his reliance on alcohol.

After the accident, he could no longer draw because his hand shook too much and he was initially afraid to venture outside his home for quite a while. But then he started to build the fictional, miniature town of Marwencol, in Belgium, perpetually stuck in a bubble that preserved the time to World War II. He populated this with heavily customised dolls and figures of alter egos of himself and friends and, even the five evil SS Men in the town who cause so much trouble for ‘Hoagy’ are based on his real life attackers. The plots to the adventures he ‘records’ photographically and in incredible detail, sometimes get quite convoluted... with very specific death rituals to truly kill an SS man, to stop them from re-spawning and... a time travelling witch called Deja Thoris (I guess Edgar Rice Burroughs fans will know where she gets her name from). There’s even another dimension with a knight who brings permanent death to the characters and a nazi encampment built around the other side of Hogancamp’s trailer where Hitler lives.

And it’s a wonderful book. The photographic artwork is truly beautiful, capturing a curious blend of gritty realism juxtaposed with a kind of fairytale whimsy. Fairytale whimsy with alcohol, cat fighting, torture and horrendous bullet wounds. These photos are really a labour of love and are dotted throughout the book which explores Hogancamp’s ‘recreation’ as a human being and then looks at his technique (to the point where he eventually embraces the digital camera... he’s a braver man than I).

The book also shows off a little of his early drawing skills and also the plans he knocks up now if he’s adding a new building to his ‘set’. There’s even a photographic plan of the town on a double page spread where most of the buildings are. And the final little extra dash of brilliance, for me, was the fact that Hogencamp’s scaled down alter ego is also busy building an even smaller model town as a hobby in his plastic reality... there’s a wonderful shot of the figure with a box housing two very small figures. It’s great stuff.

The final third of the book houses a photographic comic strip... like those old Fotonovel’s from the 1970s and 80s, telling tall tales of small people and its both charming and, sometimes, possibly a little unsettling too. But it is wonderful stuff and it's the kind of content I could look at for hours on end. I wish they’d do a show of his work here in London, England sometime.

Anyone who’s into the world of model making, miniatures, dolls and action figures would really like Welcome To Marwencol and its a definite recommendation from me (as was the movie). I can only hope that there’s a follow up volume sometime soon and I would love to see some of the comic panels as larger shots, unencumbered by the commentary. For more information on Marwencol and to buy this wonderful book, go to http://marwencol.com and may your stay in the town be as enjoyable as mine was.

Welcome To Marwen

Guy N’ Dolls

Welcome To Marwen
2018 USA
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
UK cinema release print.

So... I saw Welcome To Marwen on the first day of it’s release in the UK, which was New Year’s Day 2019. I more than not often find some of the best films of the year released in the UK over here at that time and, perhaps surprisingly, this film is no exception to that rule.

I say “surprisingly” because, although I was hooked into the idea of seeing this movie when I first saw the trailer a number of months ago, I had no idea the film did such bad business when it was released in the USA. Which just goes to show you how wrong the ‘box office’ can be when it comes to judging the art of film for its actual merits because, I have to say, this really does feel like it will quite possibly make my 2019 top ten movies listing.

The film stars Steve Carell, an actor I’m not that impressed with when he does comedy but, if you may remember if you’re a regular reader, I thought he was absolutely brilliant in the one straight role I remember seeing him in, Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World (reviewed by me here). As I’d suspected when I saw the trailer, Carell is absolutely magnificent in this as he plays both Mark Hogencamp and his imaginary alter ego, Captain Hogie, one of the dolls/action figures he works with as an artist. What I didn’t realise is that this is actually a true story. This man really exists and this is his tale...

A tale of a once great illustrator who was viciously attacked one night outside a bar for admitting he likes to strut around in high heel shoes on occasion. The night he had all memories of his former life brutally eaten out of him and, after some intense physiotherapy, barely escaped with his life. What helped him escape was the photography he created of the dolls within the village of Marwen, with which he acted out storylines to get him through the days. He became a well loved local figure and his photography started appearing in art galleries. There was even a documentary film made about him and the actual name of the real model village he made (which I won’t give away here because it becomes a story elevation point in this movie).

In the village of Marwen, in the Second World War, Hogie gets into all kinds of lethal scrapes with perpetually regenerating nazis but, he has the sexy ladies of Marwen, all armed to the teeth, to help him defend the village and attempt to protect those he loves.

And its a wonderful film. Steve Carell, as I said, does an amazing job here and so do his co-stars... Eiza González, Leslie Zemeckis, Merritt Wever, Gwendoline Christie, Stefanie von Pfetten, Janelle Monáe and Leslie Mann as the lovely new neighbour Nicol... as they all transform into animated, miniature action figures of themselves and fight imaginary battles as Hogencamp tries to survive the aftermath of the injuries on his torn apart life.

And, it’s a beautifully made film. Although the premise of characters turning into action figures could be conceived as a premise rife with opportunity for comedy, the film plays things from the heart and captures the drama and sentimentality of the situation instead (that being said, there’s a brilliant line about a ‘milk maid’ losing her cow in some cross fire and being seen to be suffering from ‘cow-lateral damage’). There’s even a character named after Edgar Rice Burroughs’ iconic Barsoomian princess Dejah Thoris, although the doll with this name here is a much more nefarious character and, when Hogencamp builds her a miniature time machine which bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain other film directed by Robert Zemeckis, there’s a nice tribute to the twin fire trails as the vehicle leaps into action. I was surprised, actually, that Alan Silvestri, who provides a heartwarming score here, wasn’t tempted to quote his own score for Back To The Future when this obvious homage occurs in the movie.

The film takes some definitely odd twists and turns in things which are revealed about the central character and the way others react to him and, all I can say is that I suspect this is maybe because the film could be ringing a lot closer to the truth of the actual events than the average docudrama (asides from all the moving action figures, obviously). The ending might be one of the things which turns people off this movie actually but, frankly, I was really pleased with the way this one finishes up and, if you want to read more into the tone of the ending then you always have the earlier scenes where a certain action figure character’s dress pops open to find some kind of closure to the final beats of the film.

And that’s all I have to say about this one. Welcome to Marwen is a truly beautiful film and one I’m glad I’ve had the privilege of seeing on the big screen. I wish it would have been out earlier over here so it could have made my Best Of 2018 list (which you can find here) but I’m glad I finally got to see it. Highly recommended.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World

All’s World That Ends World


Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World 
2012 USA/Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia 
Directed by Lorene Scafaria
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: Big, big, big spoiler giving away the film’s ending in here. If this is one you definitely want to see... you might want to carefully consider this before reading.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is not the movie I was expecting it to be.

But that’s good, actually. Because, rather than being the nauseating US romantic comedy with a cornball ending I thought it was going to be... it actually turned out, instead, to be more the movie I was hoping it would be. Which is a turn up for the books.

To explain... I had nothing invested in this movie. I like Keira Knightley as an actress, for sure, but I’d only ever seen Steve Carell once in a movie (the latest remake of Get Smart) and I didn’t know the writer/director, Lorene Scafaria’s work either. I just saw the trailer and saw what looked like a fairly gentle movie with a little bit of a bite to it in that, you know, it’s about the end of the world and such. The end of humanity. The death knell for our entire species.

But then I figured... modern US movie. This is going to be a light romantic comedy, which in some ways it actually is, and it won’t exactly have an ending where it “does what it says on the tin”, so to speak. So I decided I wouldn’t go and see it because, frankly, I don’t like modern US romantic comedies all that much. They tend to have no real substance to them. As far as the last ten or twenty years go, I generally tend to prefer romantic movies if they’re made by the French. I don’t know why but they just seem to have more of a real life, up close and personal relation to this kind of subject matter and dare to show love as it truly is... compared to a lot of the US (and even UK) films of this nature which I’ve seen. So I pretty much had stopped going to them.

But then, when I had to meet a friend in London on Saturday and we decided to go to the cinema, there was nothing else really on at the time I was around for (I’d already seen The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises, which seem to be dominating a fair amount of screens over here) and so we settled on this movie.

I’m really glad we did because, much to my surprise, it actually does do what it says on the tin.

Steve Carell plays a downbeat insurance salesman whose wife leaves him after the announcement that the final attempt to save the earth from destruction by asteroid collision has failed. This all happens before the title of the film has even come up. The character he plays, Dodge, trundles depressingly on even as those around him are either killing themselves or having apocalyptic end-of-the-world sex with each other. He meets a girl called Penny (played by Knightley who is, as always, excellent), from the apartment downstairs from his... and when the rioting and looting starts in their area they set off on a road journey to try to a) reunite him with his first ever sweetheart and b) to get Penny to his dad who will be able to fly her back to England in his plane to meet up with her family... it’s the last month of life on planet Earth and the airways have stopped flying.

True... over the course of their journey they bond and become romantically entangled, but that’s okay and can be a nice thing if the tone is caught right in a movie... which it is here. But there’s always the dark reminders of the character’s plight of, you know, dying by the end of the month and their adventures on the road are at times violent and at times comical but the low key, laid back approach that the film seems to create around its lead characters is nicely handled and doesn’t once become boring.

I said, before I saw this film, that I was hoping that this would be the American answer to Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. And it kinda is in a way. It’s like a more cheerful, less introspective alternative to Von Trier’s masterpiece. Luckily, the two leads are able to more than make up for the lack of comedy bells and whistles set pieces which a lot of films of this nature might have resorted to. And that’s something to be thankful for.

At the end of the day though (or even end of the world), the surprising thing is that it doesn’t cop out and give the planet Earth a reprieve like you are expecting it to. Dodge and Penny have finally figured out that what they want from the world is really just, each other. They lay talking on a bed and their conversation gets interrupted by the boom of the asteroid entering earths atmosphere in the sound mix and I remember I leaned over to my friend at that point and said... “I wish these guys would just roll the credits here, that would be perfect.” And then, about ten seconds later, they did just that. A white out as the characters finally find each other but die at the end of the world... is followed by the end credits. A perfect ending for this movie and I was really grateful that Hollywood didn’t go for the unbearably happy ending on this one.

Written and then directed with a deft touch by Lorene Scafaria and well acted by all the principal cast (including Martin Sheen as Dodge’s estranged father), Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is not, as the quotes on the posters may have you believe, “a feel good movie”... but it’s certainly a nice movie about love and loss and the way the pursuit of something can sometimes lead you to finding something you weren’t looking for, which turns out to be exactly what you need. If you like gentle movies with just a dash of, admittedly lightweight, depth to them, then this movie is highly recommended.