Has anyone here read the book or watched the film?
http://www.wisconsindeathtrip.com/reviews.htmlThis book was originally published in 1973. It is a compilation of news stories from Black River Falls Wi in the 1890's. These were many sordid things that transpired at that time.
This film is a bit of a departure from the book. Here is a part of a review.
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.
snip
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.”
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