Wisconsin Death Trip

The title 'Wisonsin Death Trip' is a huge misnomer. Despite carrying connotations of rural slasher movies - with demented killers, backwoods cannibalism and fatal applications of household appliances - the film in question is not an Ed Gein-inspired horror flick, but rather a sombre, po-faced black-and-white documentary.

This feature length piece was made for theatrical exhibition, and focuses on the small Wisconsin town of Black River Falls. It presents a catalogue of bizarre and tragic events that occurred therein from 1890 to 1900, by means of still photographs and seamlessly matching reconstructions, given unity by newspaper cuttings narrated by the British actor Ian Holm.

Instead of existing as a work of pure drama or entertainment, 'Wisconsin Death Trip' functions as a chunk of history. As such - and unlike the bulk of historically-based mainstream cinema - it is strictly committed to the facts. These facts are presented seriously and accurately, with a minimum of interference, distortion or associated opportunism.

The film portrays scattered occurrences, such as various suicides and suicide attempts. It focuses more prominently, however, on the individuals whose paths extend throughout the film. These include Mary Sweeney, a young woman carrying a mania for smashing windows; popular opera-singer Pauline L'Allemond who arrives from Chicago with her illegitimate son; and finally John Anderson, the 13-year-old German boy who murders a farmer, prompting an outlaw lifestyle.

As this is a historical work, we are presented with a context to explain the events. The root of all the problems stems back to 1854, when European immigrants were persuaded to move to America and buy worthless, infertile land. Various banks and businesses in Wisconsin shut down and a general depression marked the land. Many people suffered a desperate struggle against poverty. Some became unstable, and others judged their lives not worth living.

Tragic events are frequently relayed through Holm's sober narration, and some of these scenes are bracketed by a further voice-over. Often we hear from a European-American scholar, who typically describes in hushed tones that so-and-so was a farmer, German / Norwegian, and "poor", thus signposting the cause of all troubles.

This later trait is one of the many attempts made by the film-makers to dramatise events. But herein lurks one of 'Wisconsin's' problems. The hushed tones are extremely grating, and instead of infusing the film with a bleak, poetic edge - as does Werner Herzog in his masterpiece 'Lessons of Darkness' (1991) - it simply comes across as pretentious, weighing the film down with an exaggerated sense of its own importance.

Other attempts to inject affect and impact into the film include various pieces of classical music, as well as a couple of bread-and-butter juxtapositions of images such as the contrasting tableau of a public baptism with a watery suicide. The documentary format, however - which utilizes newspaper material, authentic photographs, and matching reconstructed set-pieces - is instrumental in weighing down any attempts at emotional engagement.

This mode of discourse is news: it reports real events. The narrative batters us with information - regarding who died, where, and how - and is little more than a repetitive cycle of facts. Although it does some justice to the unfortunate people who suffered and died - showing us that history has not forgotten them - there is little insight from the filmmakers themselves: they merely polish up old material and re-present it to us. The invisibility of the filmmakers and their attitudes, then, limits the scope of the film.

The use of photographs and reconstructions also fails to set the feature alight. The objective stills and stilted reconstructions keep us on the outside, and the discourse fails to penetrate the inner lives and emotional experience of its subjects. It would have been more advisable to have instead produced a feature film, which would have allowed the film-makers to characterize and humanise the Wisconsin folk, and to perhaps assess the conflict between external circumstances and inner reality - as does Bunuel's marvellous (fiction) film 'Los Olividados' (1951). We are instead given a cold, factual aesthetic, which cannot come close to doing justice to these lost and suffering people.

The 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer is adequate enough, but it suffers from a slightly soft appearance that may detract form viewing pleasure. Despite being a low-budget film, it could have been revamped and given more care and attention. This isn't the easiest of films to transfer to DVD - it is filled with different lighting conditions and creative choices such as high contrast and soft focus photography. The disc is prone to smearing, then, and artifacting is intermittent.

There are three sound tracks - 2.0, and the 5.1 and the DTS 5.1 remixes. Sound in the film is typically separated into the voice-over, the classical music than runs throughout, and the intermittent sound effects to add realism to the film, and the remixes arguably add that little extra to our appreciation of sound in the film.

Extras include an audio commentary, by the director and his DOP, who discuss the usual prosaic bits of behind the scenes information, as well as talking in more detail about some of the victims in the film and their circumstances. Also featured are deleted scenes, as well as a short making of documentary that takes us further behind the scenes.

Review by Matthew Sanderson