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Wisconsin Death Trip

New York Times Sunday, November 28, 1999
Arts and Leisure Section By Greil Marcus

A Record of Despair Born of a Single Image

When I first heard that someone had made a movie out of Michael Lesy’s shocking, genre-defying “Wisconsin Death Trip,” I could imagine the result, or think of a book less amenable to film. It seemed absolutely a thing in itself: its own construct, its own nightmare, its own scream.

The film’s director, James Marsh, of Arena, an adventurous division of the British Broadcasting Corporation, found Lesy’s legendary 1973 title in a New York used-book store. “I made the book, “ Mr. Lesy says. “The book found James.”

The mystical language is appropriate; the book can cast a spell. It is a progressively horrifying portrait of one small town, Black River Falls, Wis., crumbling --socially, morally, psychologically, physically --under the impact of the great depression of the 1890’s. The words “great depression” do not take capitals here, as with the Great Depression of the 1930’s; unlike that calamity, the depression of a century ago did not enter American folklore.

This collapse of the American economy was denied even as it happened: the 1893 Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, which introduced the Ferris wheel to the United States, was the denial as theme park. The depression hit farm states the hardest. There, where the weather had been understood as the greatest threat to an orderly life, all other foundations of predictability--the assumption that in domestic and working life one day would be much like the one before it--were destroyed.

The films Mr. Marsh made before “Wisconsin Death Trip” are imaginative, playful and well-defined; they hardly seem preparation for anything so dark and potentially borderless and out of control as his latest, which opens at the Film Forum in Manhattan on Wednesday.

Mr. Marsh received his first directorial assignment in 1989, when he was 25, Arena, says Mr. Marsh--an Englishman now living in New York --was putting on “themed evenings, four or five hours a night on a single subject.” One was “Food night,” and for it Mr. Marsh conceived a 15-minute segment on the last meals of condemned prisoners. “I wanted to know what the ritual meant in a bureaucratic system of execution,” he says, recalling that in the British tradition a prisoner’s last meal might also have involved a last drunk, complete with prostitutes. Because capital punishment had been all but abolished in the United Kingdom since the 1960’s, Mr. Marsh set off for a two-day shoot on Death Row in Louisiana. “I wanted to expose the process in one detail, “ he says. He ended up focusing on a single prisoner, a man “outraged by the crazy idea of hospitality at the end of his life.”

There is probably a more direct line from this first project to Mr. Marsh’s “Wisconsin Death Trip” than to another food piece by him, “The Burger and the King.” In this graceful account of “The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley,” the fine David Adler book on which the film is based, cooks from throughout Presley’s life--from his high school cafeteria, the Army, Graceland--present their dishes proudly and so lovingly that by the end one may want nothing more than to copy down the recipe for fried banana and peanut-butter sandwiches and make one.

“I became increasingly aware of the power of a single image, especially in photography: Diane Arbus, W. Eugene Smith,” Mr. Marsh says when asked about the inspirations behind his films. That inspiration is most visible in Arena’s revelatory 1993 series, “Story of a Song,” Mr. Marsh’s expansive accounts of Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” and, especially, Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” There Mr. Marsh offered not so much a story of a song as its biography--as if it were a person with ancestors and descendants. Watching the film, you can follow U.S. Highway 61 from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico as the Dylan song carries with it not only Highway 61 blues numbers but also the death of Bessie Smith, on Highway 61; Presley’s childhood years in public housing on Highway 61 and the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Highway 61.

The single image that seals the film, though, is a dramatization of a young Bob Dylan leaving Minnesota for New York City in 1961. Running through the shot is an early, hesitant version of his epochal “Like a Rolling Stone.” Then the soundtrack moves into the triumphant performance of “Like a Rolling Stone” from the 1965 LP that made Mr. Dylan a world figure: “Highway 61 Revisited,” the album named for the song which speaks for the United States itself. Highway 61 traces the spine of the nation, but by this point in the film you’re ready to acknowledge every American road as Highway 61.

You’ve also seen blues singers who have never heard of Bob Dylan singing their Highway 61 songs. You’ve heard homemade 1950’s tapes of Mr. Dylan as a teenage Bobby Zimmerman singing his own composition “Little Richard: and then scorning Presley, Johnny Cash and Ricky Nelson for their thefts and failings. But all of that is now subsumed into the looming night lights of Manhattan. “In a film you can create a whole complex of emotions, a situation, in a single image,” Mr. Marsh says. “For ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’ I was already informed as to the power of the single image: looking at the book and the ghosts staring back at me.”

Michael Lesy’s book, a new edition of which will be published in February by the University of New Mexico Press, was born 30 years ago when Mr. Lesy, then a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, found an archive of 3,000 images left by one Charles Van Schaick, the town photographer of Black River Falls. In Van Schaick’s time, ordinary people did not have cameras, difficult contraptions that involved black powder and heavy glass plates/ to record the passages of life--births, marriages, store openings, funerals--they turned to a professional. Mr. Lesy noticed Van Schaik’s many pictures of dead infants and children, dressed in their christening gowns, now placed in tiny coffins. As he looked for the story behind these murder, suicide, farm and business failures, madness, addictions, tramp armies, and the ruin of childhood and the desolation of families by epidemics of diphtheria, typhoid, smallpox and flu.

Mr. Lesy made a montage, using items from the local paper, contemporaneous regional fiction and poetry, asylum records and the photographs left by Van Schaick, who in Mr. Lesy’s pages emerges as Arbus’s unknown ancestor. In words, the story was almost too much to take in, the accumulation of awful facts nearly mute in their cacophony. But the pictures spoke. From Van Schaick’s archive Mr. Lesy made a tableau of disassociation, terror and insanity passing for everyday life. It was all in the blank eyes, the frozen mouths in family portraits: those were the ghosts James Marsh saw.

Mr. Marsh’s “Wisconsin Death Trip” is less a film of Mr. Lesy’s book than a quiet reinhabitating of the world it found, or made. “In a way the book is unfilmable,” says Mr. Marsh. So he left the book. For the movie, he alternates long black-and-white segments set a century ago--through prairie-flat re-enactments, you see an 1980’s avatar of Susan Smith sitting by the lake where she has drowned her children, a farmer randomly killed by a young boy, farmers who have killed themselves, two women murdered by a tramp they have fed and then the tramp’s own suicide, a madwoman traveling the country in search of windows to break, and, in parlor scenes, just how dead children were positioned to have their pictures taken--with brief, prosaic interludes of present-day Black River Falls shot in color. “What today speaks for the town,” says Mr. Marsh, What binds it, what is undermining it.”

“What I did get from the book,” Mr. Marsh says, “was the rhythm: the emerging incremental idea. But in terms of the stories themselves, the starting point was definitely photographic. Start with an image, a single image, and then move--a lot of long tracking shots, to keep a sense of the still image moving. But I knew I couldn’t film it. Do I try to contextualize the story, or do I let the stories yield their own mysteries--or do I have someone sitting in a chair explaining? That was the first choice I made, not to try and explain the social-political-cultural history of anything. The stories are based on a respect for these individual tragedies and disasters. If the film lacks one thing, it’s a governing idea on that level--but it would have been a travesty.”

What one takes away from Mr. Lesy’s book are faces. In the film, it’s a series of incidents that hangs in the memory like half-remembered dreams: true, undeniable, but unbidden and incomplete. The actors seem both physically present and psychologically anonymous. Often you don’t register their faces at all; they could be anyone. “A lot of the casting had to do with financial constraints,” Mr. Marsh says. He worked first with a limited “documentary budget” from Arena, then with money he made from projects he took on mainly to pay for “Death Trip.” Finally, after rejections from European companies on the ground that the project was, in Mr. Marsh’s words, “morbid, distateful and obsessed with the wrong aspects of human life” and after no response at all from the PBS series “The American Experience,” he was rescued by a co-sponsorship from HBO’s Cinemax division, which paid for a 35-millimeter print.

“We had open casting calls in Madison and Milwaukee: old thesps from the local theater, lots of people with interesting faces who hadn’t acted,” Mr. Marsh says. “A lot of the acting was improvised or: ‘Do nothing.’ Stand.’ “ The re-enactments were shot at 30 frames a second, he says, to get “a barely perceptible slow-motion effect: that disconcerting stillness in the scenes.” The actors, he adds, “can’t hit marks; they don’t know the grammar.

“But most of it wasn’t acting; it’s like striking poses.”

This is the source of the bluntness of the violence that is shown, which in Mr. Marsh’s film is far more stark, and seemingly unmediated, than the stylized violence that movies conventionally offer. The ordinariness of the postures and gestures of the actors puts the viewer in their shoes.

You can feel the rope pulling at your throat as a farmer dangles from a tree, go suddenly cold as another lies down in the snow across the railroad tracks, flinch and want to run as a man chases, shoots and kills the woman who will not marry him. You can even feel the deadened peace of the mother at the lake.

The instruction to do nothing, to just stand, also creates the single image, and the single face, that most people will very likely take away from “Wisconsin Death Trip”: that of Jo Vukelich as Mary Sweeney, the window smasher. As the film follows her from town to town as she picks her targets--with care, apparently, as if in an effort to make meaning, to send a message, to lodge some sort of protest--you see glass shattering, then a strongly built woman staring straight at those of her fellow who are merely watching her, or those who have come to take her away. Her fearsomely unreadable countenance sees to be insisting that by her actions she has said all that need be said, that through her destructions she is writing the book of her place and time. Only at the end of the movie is any explanation offered, but it’s hardly needed. “I am mad not without my reasons,” she seems to say with the turn of her body and the dull gleam in her eyes. “And if you had my courage you would know my reasons are yours.”

One “veers and turns,” Howie Movshovitz wrote in The Los Angeles Times after seeing the premiere of “Wisconsin Death Trip” at the Telluride Film Festival in September, “trying to avoid the possibility that the history of Black River Falls is not unlike the present all over the country.” All that allows you to avoid that conclusion, though, is the sense of insulation, of a world in suspension, that one gets from watching a movie. The day the film was show at Telluride, in Colorado, the headline in The Denver Post was generic for the reader, singular only for the people in it: “Gunman kills wife, two others at grocery store--Grand Junction woman had just served divorce papers on husband.”

As a historian, Mr. Lesy is a dramatist. Perhaps for that reason the events he recorded and the people who made them seem very far away. The people in Mr. Marsh’s picture are all without affect, and they seem to claim the present as much as the past.

The film realizes the ambitions of its small team (along with Mr. Marsh, the producer, Maureen Ryan; the director of photography Eigil Bryld, and the editor, Jinx Godfrey): the wish, in Mr. Marsh’s words, “to create rhythm, in the shooting and the editing, relentlessly putting together little fragments of stories, building to them and building away from them.” What they got, though, was the illusion of a tale complete and whole, a distant story from a century ago that with the force of prophecy seems to rush forward, to our time and past it.

and… 

New York Times
Wednesday, December 1, 1999
Film Review by Stephen Holden

How a Town in Wisconsin Went Mad

It may not have a headless horseman charging murderously through a Gothic forest, but James Marsh’s film, Wisconsin Death Trip” frequently suggests a semi-documentary offshoot of Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow.” The movie, which opens today at Film Forum, is a visually audacious riff on Michael Lesy’s macabre 1973 cult classic book of vintage photographs and news clips chronicling the human tragedies that engulfed the rural farming community of Black River Falls, Wis., in the 1890’s.

Faced with economic depression, a brutal climate and a diphtheria epidemic that decimated its infant population, a good number of the town’s citizens (most were recent German and Scandinavian immigrants) went bezerk. The murder, suicide and arson rates skyrocketed. Religious and occult fanaticism ran rampant, and many citizens of Black River Falls found themselves incarcerated in the nearby Mendota Asylum for the Insane.

The heart of the book consists of formal portraits of Black River Falls’ upright citizens taken by the town photographer, Charles Van Schaik. Their stony death-mask visages (precursors of Diane Arbus’s most disturbing work) suggest that in the worst of times the town had deteriorated into a real-life village of the damned. The accompanying newspaper accounts of the violent acts of the townspeople are so dryly factual in their understated way that read alongside grim photographs, they convey a mood of gallows humor. The very term “deathtrip” has an aura of sardonic hippie nonchalance.

Mr. Marsh’s film uses the pictures and reporting as springboards for reenactments of some of the most notorious crimes described in the book. Filmed in smudgy black and white and underscored with spiritually exalted music (everything from Arvo Part to Faure’s Requiem), they are staged as silent-movie tableaux vivants. The sardonic tone of the book is accentuated by the voice of Ian Holm reading the newspaper accounts of the murders and suicides in an insinuating voice that conveys an attitude of sly, supercilious amusement. Occasionally he dramatically lowers his voice to a hissing conspiratorial whisper.

Among the grisliest true vignettes is the story of a 13 year-old boy who shot an old hermit for kicks, then inhabited his property until his crime was discovered, after which he fled and engaged in a gun battle with a pursuing posse. Many of the other murders were crimes of passion carried out by rejected lovers.

In addition to recounting individual murders, the movie has several stories of notorious local loonies like Mary Sweeney (Jo Vukelich), a schoolmistress who traveled around Wisconsin snorting cocaine and breaking windows. (She claimed to have destroyed $50,000 worth of glass.) Then there is Pauline L’Allemand (Marilyn White), a once-successful European opera singer who arrived in the area nearly penniless and unsuccessfully tried to find patrons through a series of musical soirees. She was eventually carted off to the Mendota Asylum, from which she later escaped.

When the movie is concentrating on the book, it is a creepily enthralling document that illustrates the susceptibility to breakdown of what we think of as sanity and civilization. But the film stumbles in its color sequences, which examine life in Black River Falls today and imply that the toxins of the 1890’s are still present. As evidence that life in Black River Falls and in thousands of similar small towns across America is potentially deadly, the movie focuses on local parades, beauty contests and other small-town rituals, and relays newspaper reports of recent crimes that recall those of a century ago.

But the comparison seems shallow and forced. Life in Black River Falls may be bland and homogenized, but it doesn’t appear uncomfortable. Only one scene in which the camera studies the stony faces of the residents of an old-age home as they are serenaded by a male chorus singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” does the contemporary imagery mirror the book’s grimmest photographs.

Framing these tales is a vintage Chamber of Commerce-style pitch that extols the joys of life in Black River Falls and states that “nowhere in this great continent of ours can be found a more desirable residence.”

and…

Newsday, December 1, 1999, Film Review by Gene Seymour

It's a Mad, Mad Wisconsin

Sometime in the last decade of the 19th century, a plague hunkered down among the citizens of Black River Falls, Wis. This was not your garden-variety infestation of locusts or your basic swarm of diseased rats. If only things were that simple.

This plague, if the stories for the local paper, the Badger State Banner, are to be believed--was an invisible yet overpowering cloud of insanity that descended upon this small community of farmers and merchants, many of whom had just come from Germany and Scandinavia to settle and make money. This may have been harder to do in 1890’s America than at other times, given a bad economic depression where severity would be exceeded 40 years later.

“Wisconsin Death Trip”, a dramatization of Michael Lesy’s 1973 coffee-table book of archival photos and news accounts from that sad and mad decade in Black River Falls, alludes to this economic depression as a possible cause of the town’s peculiarly widespread clinical depression. Root causes, however, get lost in the unrelenting strangeness that writer-director James Marsh parades before our eyes in beautiful black and white.

Mixing some of the same photos unearthed by Lesy with some dramatized footage of his own, Marsh presents his own version of “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.” His stars include Young Anderson (Marcus Monroe), a 13 year-old boy playing with guns in a farmers backyard, then killing the farmer just for fun and leading a posse on a merry and murderous chase.

Then, there’s the coke sniffing schoolmarm named Mary Sweeney (Jo Vukelich), who frequently goes off on window-breaking rampages. Also a man named Henry Johnson, who for no apparent reason cut the heads off all his chickens and set them on fire. He then threw his best clothes and himself--into the fire. And then there’s the opera singer (Marilyn White), who just shows up in town, stays for a while and goes quietly crazy before being sent off to the nearby Mendota Asylum for the Insane--which you imagine, must have been as crowded as a trendy restaurant on a weekend.

Young lovers making suicide-murder pacts, teen aged girls committing arson because they are bored, vagrants killing people who give them bread, lonely old people who shoot themselves because they can’t stand themselves any longer....Oddly enough, the more such stories you hear, the less removed from the present day they sound. Though actor Jeffrey Gordon is shown portraying the newspaper editor who keeps tabs on this shocking stuff, it is the soft voice of Ian Holm that you hear reading the editor’s stories as if he were calmly delivering a coroner’s report to a dumbfounded jury.

and…

Kamal Ahmed-Media Correspondent, The Guardian, Manchester, England

Suicide, disease, drug taking, animal slaughter… one of the most astonishing portraits of small town America, using previously unseen archive pictures of life and death in a remote Midwest town…

and…

Greil Marcus @ salon.com

In 1973 historian Michael Lesy, working from an 1890's archive left by the town photographer of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, published a book of this name. It was a study of morbidity replacing vitality in the conduct of everyday life, a chronicle of seven plagues - childhood epidemics, murder, suicide, insanity, drought, tramp armies and economic ruin - and the story of how the depression of the 1890's all but dissolved the assumption that is the bedrock of ordinary affairs: that tomorrow will be like today. Using unbearably intense frame-enlargements of family pictures, Lesy focused on dissasociation in eyes, on horror around mouths. The time seemed very far away.

In James Marsh's poetically cruel film - rumored to be set for its world premiere over Labor Day weekend at the Telluride Film Festival, which never announces its program in advance - the distance of then from now seems our conceit, and Marsh collapses it. Using a steely, low-contrast black and white for the 1890's, color for underplayed footage of Black River Falls in the 1990's, and working almost without faces, re-enacting incidents Lesy unearthed the if-I-can't-have-you-nobody-can killings that in our newspapers seem like weather reports and here appear as parables scripted by Jim Thompson, or a 125-year-old Wisconsin Susan Smith, peacefully waiting by the water after drowning her children - Marsh leaves only the quiet as an anomaly; salvation through vengeance seems not a psr of time but part of the land.

read more at salon.com

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