Last night I re-aquainted myself with James Marsh's disturbing docu-drama WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP on dvd. Originally shown under the Arena banner on BBC2 the film was later given an art-house release in the US (which was news to me).

It's based on a 1973 book by Michael Lesy who had discovered a large archive of images by Charles van Shaik, the town photographer in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. The photographs dated from 1890-1900 and Lesy linked the pictures of the town's inhabitants with extracts from the local newspaper about odd incidents that occured there during the late 19th Century. It took Marsh 5 years to make his film owing to the difficulty in getting funding due to the bizarre subject matter. It's bizarre alright... a David Lynch film made reality.

Black River Falls had been in existance for 30-odd years when the film starts, it's population primarily drawn from Norwegian, Swedish and German immigrants seeking a better life in the US. The depression that gripped the midwest in 1893 did the town no favours. Widespread unemployment, the town bank's closure, as well as a particularly savage winter, saw suicides among the farming community and an increase in admissions to the local insane asylum at Mendota. The film breaks down into seasonal segments chronicling further strange news stories: a diptheria epidemic kills a large percentage of children, unexplained suicides, ghost-sightings, paranoia, arson, murders... There are also two women who reappear several times: opera singer Pauline L'Allemand who appeared in the original production of LAKME somehow wound up in Black River Falls thinking it would be a cultural mecca but ended up in a small rundown shack eating animal feed and Mary Sweeney, a one-time school-mistress who after an accident which involved a thump to the head became addicted to cocaine and travelled around the state smashing in windows. The police would arrest her, release her and she moved on to another town to continue her window smashing. Needless to say both opera singer and possible proto-feminist anarchist ended up in the insane asylum.

These news items - written by the English-born editor of the local newspaper - are dryly read by Ian Holm's amused and conspiratorial off-screen narrator over the wonderfully crisp b/w cinematography of Eigil Bryld who deservedly won a BAFTA award. Taking his lead from van Shaik's 1890's photographs his cinematography conjures up monotone still lifes of... well... real people's monotone still lives. Using local actors and townspeople as his cast director Marsh and Bryld come up with haunting images that stay with you: a brother is reflected in a pool of his sister's blood after he has shot her, the slow camera pan which looks up into the branches of trees to reveal the bare feet of a suicide, a 14 year old bride is posed next to her husband aged 64, and a mother sits serenly staring out at the lake where she has just drowned her three children, one of whose body lies a few yards away.

A genuinely creepy American Gothic original which I found hard to shake off - especially as I finished watching it in the dark small hours. My only complaint is the usual problem with documentary makers cutting cloth to suit length - the original timeline of 10 years used by Lesy in his book is reduced dramatically to all the events seemingly happening in the space of one year which strains the credibility somewhat, you end up thinking 'why did people stay in this possessed town?'. However the hypnotic imagery and disturbing content keep you gripped throughout and makes you appreciate the irony in starting and ending the film with the newspaper editor's words "It is safe to assume that nowhere in the length and breadth of this great continent of ours can be found a more desirable residence than Black River Falls”.