| Wisconsin Death Trip
First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.
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Wisconsin Death Trip (The Movie) |
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"Wisconsin Death Trip" is a film like no others. Based on
the book by Michael Lesy, it accumulates newspaper articles, asylum logs,
and other authentic sources to reconstruct terrifying events in Black River
Falls, Wisconsin during the 1890s. Driven insane by economic depression,
deprivation, and hunger, inhabitants resorted to random violence, arson,
suicide, and murder at an incredible rate and frequency. It is horrifying
and strangely exhilerating to watch the ceaseless parade of atrocities, set
to beautiful classical music, John Cale, and DJ Shadow and illustrated by
surviving photographs and convincing black-and-white enactments. For anybody
with a morbid streak, "Wisconsin Death Trip" provides a fascinating look at
civilization breaking down. |
New York Times
"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 a life, births, marriages, store openings, funerals, so they turned to a professional. Lesy noticed Van Schaicks'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 photos, he found a story of plagues: of murder, suicide, farm and business failures, madness, addiction, tramp armies, and the ruin of childhood and the desolation of families by epidemics of diptheria, typhoid, smallpox, and flu. 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 Lesy's pages emerges as Arbus's unknown ancestor." |
| "The last decade of the 19th century was,
for some Americans, a time when great fortunes were to be made. For many
others, however, the period was a time of economic dislocation, when the
gap between city and countryside, rich and poor, grew ever wider. As the
Indian Wars ended and the Gilded Age extended into America's first Imperial
Age, social critics such as Mark Twain and William Dean Howells began to
examine the dark side of the American dream: violence, poverty, degenerate
behavior, suicide, and insanity.
In the late 1960s, another desperate time, historian Michael Lesy took a long look at fin-de-siècle America. Examining a collection of several thousand glass plate negatives and historical documents from Jackson County, Wisconsin, he concocted a sprawling treatise on a past that had been willfully forgotten, a brooding rejoinder to Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. First published in 1973, Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, now reissued in a handsome paperbound edition, became a key text of the counterculture, a book to shelve alongside Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Custer Died for Your Sins--and it sometimes reads like a hip product of its time. Lesy documents the unsettling record of one small corner of rural America, turning up accounts of barn burnings, attacks by gangs of armed tramps, threatening and obscene letters, death by diphtheria and smallpox (the Wisconsin townsfolk had, some years, to attend several funerals a week), alcoholism, madness, business and bank failures, and even a case or two of witchcraft. After reading Lesy's texts and viewing the sometimes unsettling images he's turned up, you would be forgiven for thinking that no one in small-town Wisconsin in our great-great-grandparents' time was well-adjusted--which is, of course, not the case. Hyperbole notwithstanding, this is a remarkable study, one that Lesy himself rightly calls an experiment in both history and alchemy." --Gregory McNamee (for amazon.com) |
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