Wisconsin Death Trip (James Marsh, 1999)
This solemn and beautifully haunting docu-fiction from filmmaker James Marsh (who has been recently getting much praise for films such as Man on Wire in 2008 and Project Nim in 2011) adapts Michael Lesy’s 1973 unadaptable photo book of the same name into, as Greil Marcus puts it in the essay accompanying the film’s DVD release “a progressively horrifying portrait of one small town, Black River Falls, Wisconsin, crumbling – socially, morally, physically, emotionally – under the impact of the great depression of the 1890s”. Vibrant display of the Gothic notion of the community as destined to disintegration and bearer of macabre secrets (see Thomas Ligotti’s 1996 short story The Shadow at the Bottom of the World for more on that subject as well as countless others), Wisconsin Death Trip structures itself around seasons to recount the strange happenings -murder, mental illness, hints of the supernatural and so on - that befell the inhabitants of Black River Falls at the turn of the century. Based on actual news articles from the local paper at the time, Marsh adapts the book in appropriately photographic montage sequences, most of which are captured in gorgeous black and white. Narrative upon narrative pile upon each other to eventually form a pathological portrait of America, which is uncannily doubled when Marsh cuts to contemporary Black River Falls a hundred years later, which he does not explicitly paint the same way but which one fills with similar dread and a just-found knowledge history. Unconventional and highly recommended, seeing this on the heels of reading Stephen King’s decent 1922 novella (2010; for which this film served as an inspiration) proved a great complement.
