Welcome to The Queue — your day by day distraction of curated video content material sourced from throughout the online. As we speak, we’re watching a video essay that explores why it’s best to watch the 1999 docudrama Wisconsin Demise Journey.
In 1973, Michael Lesy revealed his first non-fiction post-mortem. It was a coroner’s report on the American Dream. And its identify was Wisconsin Demise Journey. Lesy’s guide — principally comprised of historic pictures — lays naked a lot of incidents that happened throughout a five-year interval in Jackson County, Wisconsin across the flip of the twentieth century. Eccentricity. Plague. Demonic possessions. Teenage arsonists. The works.
With sparse commentary by Lesy and excerpts from related texts, Wisconsin Demise Journey is primarily made up of pictures and articles from the city newspaper. How, then, do you adapt such bleak, intimate, historic rubbernecking into a movie?
Virtually thirty years after Lesy’s guide hit cabinets, James Marsh (of Man on Wire fame) launched a docudrama of the identical identify, which, like its supply materials, grew to become a cult hit.
Paradoxically, contemplating the movie’s inherent and specific American material, Marsh’s movie is notoriously troublesome to seek out on-line outdoors of the UK. That is, partially, as a result of the movie was financed underneath the auspices of BBC’s Enviornment.
Paying homage to Twin Peaks and narrated with a simmering bile by Ian Holm, Wisconsin Demise Journey is as hypnotic and lyrical as they arrive. A bleak assemblage that reeks of the despair rotting underneath the floorboards of rural America.
Curiosity piqued? Right here’s a video essay that expounds additional on why Wisconsin Demise Journey is a movie effectively value looking down.
Watch “Wisconsin Demise Journey – Genuine Gothic Americana”
Who made this?
This video essay on the American Gothic docudrama Wisconsin Demise Journey is by You Have Been Watching Movies. United Kingdom-based author Oliver Bagshaw produces the channel, creating video essays on an assortment of films, from cult to basic strains of cinema historical past. You’ll be able to subscribe to their YouTube channel here.
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Meg has been writing professionally about all issues film-related since 2016. She is a Senior Contributor at Movie College Rejects in addition to a Curator for One Good Shot. She has attended worldwide movie festivals equivalent to TIFF, Scorching Docs, and the Nitrate Image Present as a member of the press. In her day job as an archivist and data supervisor, she recurrently works with bodily media and is dedicated to making sure ongoing bodily media accessibility within the digital age. You’ll find extra of Meg’s work at Cinema Scope, Lifeless Central, and Nonfics. She has additionally appeared on a lot of film-related podcasts, together with All of the President’s Minutes, Zodiac: Chronicle, Cannes I Kick It?, and Junk Filter. Her work has been shared on NPR’s Pop Tradition Blissful Hour, Enterprise Insider, and CherryPicks. Meg has a B.A. from the College of King’s Faculty and a Grasp of Data diploma from the College of Toronto.
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