The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 4-10
Marwencol (2010)
Directed by Jeff Malmberg
Having been brutally beaten outside a bar in Kingston, New York, for reasons not immediately exposited, Mark Hogancamp took up his own method of art therapy, building a model of an Allied-occupied Belgian town in his yard and in the woods around his town. To populate the town, he orders Barbies and foot-high WWII soldier dolls—the characters are named after people he knows. The town of Marwencol has an ongoing narrative—a nonstandard WWII story that leans to the very personal, and occasionally fetishistic. (When a soldier is captured by the SS, the women of the town band together to rescue him, then grind their heels into the SS commander’s crotch.) Mark takes thousands of photographs of Marwencol’s new twists and turns; eventually, a local photographer tips off Esopus, which leads to a print feature and, subsequently, a gallery exhibition at White Columns. It’s all inherently fascinating, and Malmberg neither gawks nor builds up a condescending outsider-artist mythology around his subject, making Marwencol not just a curio-doc with an above-average hook, but an insightful perspective on the uses and limits of fantasy. Mark Asch (November 10, 8pm at the IFC Center’s “Stranger Than Fiction”; book signing with Mark Hogancamp follows)