Wisconsin Death Trip

A documentary about an American town. The place is Black River Falls, Wisconsin. The period is the 1890s. Strange things happen there for ten years. The source is the local newspaper. A reporter wrote the weekly items, and read together those items become something else. A woman breaks every window in town. She does it for years and goes to jail each time. A man declares himself a prophet living in a cave. Children die of diphtheria. One family buries three in a week. People kill themselves. The number is unusual. A woman poisons her husband. Another burns her house. From there the documentary arranges the records by season. Winter, spring, summer, autumn. The narrative offers no cause. Economic collapse, epidemic, isolation and religion; all of it is there and none of it is put forward as an explanation. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but a record: its idea is that the sum of what one newspaper wrote over ten years becomes a portrait of a town, and that the portrait is unbearable. The images split in two. The past is black and white reconstruction; the present is colour documentary footage. The same town is in the present-day part. People go to school, snow is cleared, a band plays. There is no comment between the two layers. The viewer makes the connection. Ian Holm narrates and reads the text straight from the newspaper cuttings. Photographs of the period are used as well. The glass negatives of a local photographer named Charles Van Schaick, including photographs of dead children. The source is Michael Lesy's book of 1973, which is made of the same cuttings and the same photographs. James Marsh directed. Who it is for: anyone interested in experimental documentary and American provincial history. Who it is not for: anyone looking for structure; the narrative builds no argument and the repeating notices of death become numbing after a while.