Toy Truth of War

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Filmmakers and historical reenactors have been trying for decades to show the war as truthfully as possible. And they succeed with varying degrees of success. But the American Mark Hogancamp recreates the war with dolls!

It all started with the fact that after a traumatic brain injury, Mark Hogankamp was ordered by doctors to engage in any kind of creativity in order to restore coordination, vision and psyche. Then he decided to turn his attention to the events of the Second World War.

In the backyard of his home, Mark Hogankamp built an entire training ground called Marwencol, on which he recreated, on a one to six scale, different locations of the largest military conflict in the history of Mankind. We saw something similar in Michael Paul Smith's toy town. But the latter created the ideal city of his dreams, and Hogankamp created a completely imperfect place - a place of hostilities.

And then he "populated" these locations with "people", that is, with dolls taken by him from various sources. Moreover, he created some of the dolls with his own hand, using his friends, neighbors, doctors and other close people as prototypes. He himself sewed clothes for them, built equipment, armed them.

And as a result, his backyard turned into a time machine that takes people back in time during the Second World War. Here you can see the battle of American soldiers with the Japanese or Germans, and field surgery during the war, and the rest of these soldiers in between hostilities, and even various intimate scenes. Changing the positions of the bodies of these dolls and their deployment, Mac Hogankamp tells whole stories. what happened during the war.

Moreover, in most cases, a person who sees these photographs does not always immediately realize that this is just a puppet reconstruction of events, and not documentary filming.