It’s always tempting to treat America’s distant past as a simpler, gentler time, a rosy fog of Sunday socials and barbershop quartets on the town square. For nostalgia peddlers who preach “traditional values,” problems like irrational violence and drug abuse are newfangled aberrations, not repeating patterns. Those folks are thus unlikely to find a movie more disturbing this year than Wisconsin Death Trip, a 75-minute documentary showing 7:30 p.m. Monday on Cinemax’s “Reel Life” series.
Produced by Maureen Ryan, a former Nashvillian, and written and directed by British documentarian James Marsh, Wisconsin Death Trip is adapted from a notorious 1973 book by Michael Lesy. While a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Lesy discovered an archive of 3,000 photos from the town of Black River Falls, Wis. They had been taken by photographer Charles Van Schaick as far back as the 1890s. Back then, as Ryan explains, photography was such an expensive, unwieldy process that the townspeople—mostly farmers, laborers, and immigrants—reserved sittings only for special occasions.
In Black River Falls, Lesy found, that occasion was often death. Researching back issues of the local paper, the Badger State Banner, Lesy made a chilling discovery. Between 1890 and 1900, as economic ruin swept the heartland, Black River Falls was beset by epidemics, lurid deaths, unspeakable crimes, and acts of madness at once surreal and mundane. Those newspaper reports, juxtaposed with Van Schaick’s eerie, silvery photos, formed the bulk of Wisconsin Death Trip.
“We think of the Victorian era as this rarefied period,” says producer Ryan, who moved back to New York last December after six years producing commercials and music videos in Nashville. She met writer-director Marsh through a mutual friend, Young Poisoner’s Handbook director Ben Ross, and spent two years shepherding the film to completion. “Immigrants were told you could come to America and find a new life. But in the case of Black River Falls, it was stumpland, bitter cold, and infant mortality.”
The movie alternates Van Schaick’s photographs with black-and-white Super 16mm reenactments of the news clippings, narrated by Ian Holm in the paper’s own dry, monochromatic words. A 13-year-old boy guns down a farmer for kicks. A woman drowns her children; a drunken farmer dashes out his infant’s brains. A schoolmistress named Mary Sweeney, high on cocaine, smashes $50,000 worth of storefront windows. Townspeople whisper of demons and are carted off to the local asylum.
The silent reenactments and flat narration become a loop of perpetual grotesquerie—“the accumulation of awful facts nearly mute in their cacophony,” as Greil Marcus wrote in a lengthy New York Times rave last November. Color footage of contemporary Black River Falls only accentuates the oddity. The reenactments call to mind Errol Morris’ quirky documentaries, and as in Morris’ films they sometimes detract from the stark gravity of the actual documents. But the portrait of America’s past as a livid, unfathomable miasma is still hard to shake.
So how did Black River Falls welcome the project? “People were really interested,” Ryan said. “They’ve been living with the book for 25 years.” One resident helped with everything from locations to boiling a sheep’s head for one scene; a reenactment group donated its services onscreen as a mounted posse. With encouragement from Cinemax’s Sheila Nevins and Nancy Abraham, Ryan delivered a feature-length documentary on a minuscule budget. “I have a reputation as someone who can stretch a dollar,” the producer says wryly.
After its premiere last fall at the Telluride Film Festival, Wisconsin Death Trip played on the festival circuit and enjoyed a brief but successful theatrical release; it may return to theaters after showing on Cinemax. Ryan and Marsh will collaborate next on a true-crime project set in Florida. They hope to find the climate more hospitable than Wisconsin’s extremes of heat and cold.
“I had the most extreme winter gear available, and I was still cold; I can’t imagine what it was like 100 years ago,” Ryan says. “And it was really harsh in summer. People in Wisconsin really don’t get a break.” There’s news.
