Art As Therapy

In 2000, Mark Hogancamp was attacked outside a bar in upstate New York by five men, and left for dead. After nine days in a coma, Hogancamp recovered, but with brain damage and a permanently clouded short-term memory. Unable to remember his attack —and process it— Hogancamp, a former carpenter and navyman, throws himself into a therapeutic project part play-acting, part artwork, part obsession: building a 1/6 scale WWII Belgian town he calls Marwencol, authoring an ever-evolving daily soap-opera, and endlessly photographing his world. It's art therapy by way of Henry Darger, and, in turn, Hogancamp becomes an outsider artist, his work first published in Esopus magazine, then displaying in New York galleries.

When the Esopus edition featuring Hogancamp's photography came out, it was 2005. Jeff Malmberg was working as an editor-for-hire in Los Angeles, and longs to throw himself into documentary-making, attracted by its editorial freedoms and freedom from genre narratives. He charges himself with finding a subject, and, days later, he sees Hogancamp's photography. “And four years later,” Malmberg smiles, “I ended up with a film.”

Malmberg's film, Marwencol, is an astonishing documentary portrait about art-as-therapy, neural plasticity, and the fallout from trauma; a work that resembles Werner Herzog's transcendent non-fiction features. It's an intimate picture that invites you into Hogancamp's world, and then into his imaginary world. It's a feature, in many ways, on its subject's terms.

“Here was a guy who couldn't even —because of his head and his brain damage— remember exactly what you were asking, so he couldn't answer the questions that you wanted to ask him,” Malmberg offers. “Once I realised that Mark wasn't going to answer to my version of Marwencol —because he couldn't, because his mind was so much in one place or another— then I realised that my job was just to document everything he was saying, and to just try and make sense out of it later, in editing.”

Having spent so much intimate time with Hogancamp, Malmberg felt “a lot of responsibility” in portraying his story on screen; “I wanted to make an honest film, but I also wanted to make sure he didn't get hurt in the process, and that people didn't judge him poorly,” the filmmaker says. The closeness came about because of their twin, parallel artistic obsessions: Malmberg's documentary, Hogancamp's scale model. “It's hard to understand just how deep this playworld he has made goes,” Malmberg says. “You get a sense of it in the film, but not quite: it's really deep, and really far-gone, and really weird. It's like he's trying to pull off the greatest story ever.”

Critical plaudits have stopped just short of calling Marwencol that; its universal praise sitting atop a shifting tide of discussion. “There's two ways to take it: there's the art-as-therapy side of it, then there's another side of it that's maybe a little darker,” Malmberg says. “That's the great thing about documentaries: it's grey. It's not black-and-white; you can give credence to both sides of the stories, that both of them can be true. The last scene allows you to see Marwencol as his salvation, or as a hole [Hogancamp] can fall into. And it's up to you to decide.”

WHAT: Marwencol
WHEN & WHERE: Friday 29 March, Rooftop Movies