This is a truly amazing piece of work. Creepy and bizarre yet always humane. Firstly, yes it is a documentary. But a documentary does not have to be some guy following his subject with a camera. The verity form of documentary film-making is a great and valid one but it is not right for every subject and it is not the only documentary form. Marsh's film is a hybrid between documentary and fiction film-making. He uses dramatic reconstructions skillfully, inter cutting with contemporary, reportage material. The film is a series of snapshots, reports of bizarre events, murders, suicides and strange customs taken from contemporaneous newspaper reports of the time. It aims to provide an alternative view of an area's history by looking beneath the surface at the strange footnotes of history which somehow frequently manage to get lost in the history books. And it is absolutely stunning to look at. The dramatic reconstructions are shot in dreamlike black and white, filmed to mirror the technical conventions of the time. The contemporary footage is similarly beautiful - a filmed photo story of the town today. The film is stunning enough on its own terms but when you consider that they shot all this on a low, TV documentary budget it becomes awe-inspiring. As to the dramatic structure, the film makes it quite clear at the beginning that the stories took place between 1890 and 1900. The use of the five chapters themed by the seasons (it, tellingly, begins and ends in Winter) is intended to link the stories thematically and by subject matter. It is like the ages of man - the early stories involve children, then adolescents, then adults, then old people, etc... True, the blurb on the DVD box is slightly misleading - it suggests that the film will unravel the mystery of why all these things happened in this one town and its surrounding areas. That is not Marsh's fault and his film should not be criticised for not delivering what it never intended to. It is instead a record of some truly strange happenings. Why did they happen? Why does weird stuff continue to happen? In his highly enlightening commentary Marsh explains that he was interested in drawing parallels between then and now and I think his film exceeds in doing this brilliantly. It is a great idea, to examine life by looking at the ways in which we die. Wisconsin Death Trip is a sad, strange, beautiful, disturbing and blackly comic little masterpiece and I urge you to check it out.
Review of Wisconsin Death Trip
