Tuesday Night Movie Club: Marwencol

Join us for the last Tuesday Night Movie Club (TNMC) event in the series this year! We will screen Marwencol, a 2011 Wisconsin Film Festival selection.

Here’s the original write-up from the Film Guide:

Danger is everywhere in the WWII-era Belgian town of Marwencol. Teeming with sinister Nazis, heroic marines, and vigilante barmaids, it would appear lawless and threatening were its residents not meticulously dressed action figures and Barbie dolls. At 1/6-scale size and outfitted with enough plastic artillery to take down the Cobra Commander, Marwencol is the fascinating creation of outsider artist Mark Hogancamp. Suffering from permanent brain damage after being beaten outside a bar in upstate New York, he constructed a kind of self-imposed therapy, furnishing toy soldiers with elaborate backstories that echoed his own trials.

As Hogancamp embroidered his comic book scenarios with novelistic detail, his secret refuge unfurled into an epic private world. This self-contained universe has been documented by Hogancamp’s photographs of his painstakingly crafted tableaux. Shot on disposable cameras with an uncannily cinematic eye – short focal lengths, natural lighting, an innate sense of visual space – the images could pass for stills from the greatest war movie never made. Eventually the art world catches on to the magic of Marwencol, and the prospect of gallery exhibition forces Mark to decide whether to let the outside world intrude on his fantasy. This incredible, indelible documentary has scooped up top prizes at the 2010 SXSW, Hot Docs, Seattle, Silverdocs, Comic-Con, and Vienna Film Festivals (among others), and was named one of the year’s 10 best films by New York Magazine, the Boston Globe, Slate, and NPR. “Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experiences you hope to get from documentaries… a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness.” -Michael Atkinson, Village Voice.

TNMC is presented by the UW–Madison Division of the Arts, the UW-Madison Department of Communication Arts and WUD Film.