Review of Marwencol (2010) by Brian D — 20 Jun 2011

This is fantastic. A drunk is nearly beat to death by five men. The resulting brain damage destroys many of his functions, but deals with it by creating a world with dolls, creating scenes, and photographing them. He is an artist in every sense of the word.

Before the attack, he kept a journal and had lots of drawings, which were pretty good. So he's always had some artist in him. After, he goes into great detail in the dolls, creating characters, situations, and giving the dolls makeup, props, etc. At first, I thought most of the credit went to the photographer. The pictures seem almost perfectly scaled, etc, and many look very real, especially when the dolls are fully clothed so you can't see the joints. As it turns out, Hogancamp does the photography himself, often times reshooting scenes two and three times because he does not have the best knowledge of photography.

It's a pretty remarkable story. I'm always fascinated by the mind, especially the artist's mind. I've watched other documentaries were people are otherwise incapable of doing much of anything but creating drawings, sounds, etc. This guy goes real far in producing realistic images, to the point of dragging the toy jeep down the road to wear off the new store look on the wheels. But how a brain damaged man can create these stories and have the visual creation to go as far as he does with the dolls is just amazing. To top it off by capturing the scenes with great photography just makes it profound.