The first publisher of Wisconsin Death Trip was an underground newspaper called Take Over. I worked there - if you choose to call what I did work - as a political collage maker while I studied American history in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Take Over had made a name for itself by publishing a fabricated story about a murder committed at a huge meat processing plant, downwind from the state capital, across the highway from the city's sewage treatment plant.
The paper claimed that the dead man's body had been disposed of by blending it with the other meat that left the plant's renowned hot-dog production line. The plant called a news conference to deny the story but since the worker - who had never existed - had vanished, the plant found it difficult to prove a negative and the paper's reputation was made, and so followed that first fabrication with something even less plausible: "Nixon Invades Cambodia" was the 12 inch headline.
Unfortunately, two weeks after we reported it, President Nixon actually did send US troops across the border. No-one would print the paper, let alone advertise in it. Eventually we found printer 60 miles away who would print the thing after hours - as long as no-one found out. A coalition of wholesale marijuana dealers, known as the Midwest Dealers Association, tithed themselves to pay for printing costs. The paper's politics, combined with its funding sources, provided the police with sufficient cause to spy on it, paid informants, installed wiretaps, and infiltrated agents to keep watch over our daily lives.
The result was that one day, when a fellow I barely knew finished laying out a page and got in his car to drive off to firebomb an insurance company, he was followed by an unmarked convoy of Red Squad detectives. They didn't even give him a chance to light a match before they tried to arrest him. The boy ran. The police ran after him - all the way to his apart ment where he pulled a gun and shot and wounded a police officer.
The cops probably would have killed him, except he was white and his mother taught at the university. I ended up at the University of Wisconsin because I thought I wanted to study European social history. I'd graduated from Columbia College in New York City in 1967, one year before the anti-Vietnam student demonstrators occupied its buildings. When I first told my friends I was leaving to study in Wisconsin, a few asked me where Wisconsin was.
I answered that, to the best of my knowledge, it was near Wyoming since, as everyone knew, the states were arranged alphabetically, east to west, from A to Z. It felt like the end of the alphabet once I arrived in Madison, the state capital. The place was beautiful; the women were stunning, but the New York Times arrived two days late, and it was impossible to see more than one new movie a week, let alone the three a day I was used to in New York.
Worse than that, my professor was a mincing little man with a dachshund who insisted that for starters, we read and translated Martin Luther's letters to the German princes. I had one book of photographs with me - an anthology of black and white images called The Photographer's Eye, published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Several images in it - one in particular, of an old lady standing by a fence - had captions which identified them as coming from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
I was so bored that I went looking for them; what I blundered into changed my life. The society kept all its photographs in something called the department of iconography whose offices were up a flight of marble stairs, down a dim, chilly corridor, off a foyer that overlooked the carved plaster columns and Palladian windows of the society's main reading room.
As I opened the door, I heard the music: Janis Joplin, soft, sweet, low and desperate, thrumming like a cat. There was one light on in the whole place, a buttermilk saucer of it, pooled on the secretary's desk. She lay across it, head cradled in her arms. "Take it. Take another little piece of my heart," Janis sang.
The curator of the place - its founder and director - was an old man named Paul Vanderbilt. He had a little bit of white hair and a scraggly white beard, but his lips and eyes were as sweet and soft as a boy's. "Yes, yes", he said. "We have those pictures. But we have quite a few others, too. Marsha," he said, "would you mind turning on the lights, please?"
When Marsha did, I realised how much I didn't know. The room was lined with filing cabinets; bank after bank of steel shelves in parallel lines ran into the depths of the space. I had walked into my first photographic archive. That afternoon, Paul and I began a conversation that continued, one day to the next, for four years. Some days, I thought he was Prospero; some days, Polonius; some days, Lear.
In fact, he was Hess's Master of the Glass Bead Game. He knew about tacit meanings and the language of things; he understood the syntax of juxtapositions, inferences, and ambiguities; he could recite 1,000 word sentences coiled inside a single, frozen moment.
Outside, in what passed for the real world, people, well known and otherwise, were getting shot to death in their beds, or in hotel kitchens, or in the backseats of convertibles, or on their way to their motel rooms. Half a world away, we were turning a whole country into a cratered charnel house. I told the professor with the dachshund that I had other things to do.
I declared myself a student of American history, settled into my conversations with Paul, and began to read everything and anything my professors wanted me to know about US foreign and domestic policy. One day, Paul asked me if I'd ever heard of August Sander or seen any of his work.
"Of course", I said. "Not as much as I'd like, though." Sander had been a portrait photographer in Cologne. After the first world war, he'd decided to systematically photograph the entire human race, type by type, trade by trade, class and caste. He'd printed his portraits on photographic paper engineered to reproduce everything he saw in fine grained, flawless detail.
Unfortunately, the Nazis had their own ideas of what constituted the human race and destroyed the printing plates of Sanders' book. Twenty five years after the second world war, Sanders' great images were just being printed and published again.
"Well," said Paul, "if you like Sanders, you might want to look at these."
"These" were 3,000 images made at the very end of the 19th century by a man named Charles Van Schaick, the town photographer of a Wisconsin county seat called Black River Falls. Those images eventually became the images of Wisconsin Death Trip.
It was the eyes of the people in the pictures that did it to me. Their gaze; their long, slow, steady gaze. Since I was an earnest young historian, I began to investigate the history of the town where Van Schaick worked.
As I began to list the data sources - diaries, newspaper on microfilm, state statistics - I asked Paul if I could make slides of some of the images.
"And why?" he asked.
I'd started a film society, I told him. We were showing things like Bunuel's Le Chien Andalou, but it was all on 16mm, and in between reels, we needed something to entertain the audience. I thought the slides would amuse people.
"Fine", he said. So, in between eyeballs being slit and men with movie cameras riding trollies, I showed slide sequences of Van Schaick's portraits. I read as many farm diaries from the area around Black River Falls as I could stand. "Rain today. Too wet to plant," was all that happened.
I made my notes and went on to the town's newspaper. I spooled the first reel of microfilm that had been made of it, and began to read the state and local news columns. In between the church supper announcements and the birth and betrothal notices, the murders and suicides and the ghosts began to appear. I looked up and away from the screen.
The microfilm reading room was a cold, dark, low-ceiling vault, quiet except for the sound of chairs shifting across its marble floor, and the whine of motor- drives winding microfilm.
"Jesus!" I whispered.
"No-one ever told me about this stuff."
The "stuff" kept coming, issue after issue. Arsons, epidemics, infanticides, suicides, bankruptcies.
"Ah, my God," I thought, "I've stumbled into a madhouse." Not so, though. The state statistics showed the place had normal rates for everything - mental and physical health; infant mortality, commercial activity and crop production. Worse yet, the craziness was being reported from all across the region.
I settled into a rhythm: I attended lectures, spoke up at seminars, talked with Paul - and read microfilm. Reel after reel of it. Flat, uninflected chronicles of suffering, suffering everywhere. At the end of the day, I'd stagger out into the light, go home, get loaded, and read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.
"So it goes," said Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim.
"So it goes." I'd stumbled into a holocaust without Jews, buried in the history of the heartland of the United States, at the end of an era that everyone kept calling the Gay Nineties.
Half my friends were academics; half were artists, subversives, and outcasts. Every one of us knew that something had gone wrong with our country. The academics sat in classrooms and libraries, poring over documents like medical researchers, trying to discover the origins of the outbreak that was killing everyone.
The outcasts and revolutionaries I knew - the dope dealers and ideologues and outlaw bikers, the larcenous poets and whole-earth farmers and hermit-girl truck drivers - were evenly divided between those who wanted to bring down the walls, and those who wanted to head for the hills before anyone lit the first match. And me? All I wanted to do was make a movie.
Back in New York, I'd spent a quarter of my life in the dark, in theatres like the New Yorker, and the Thalia, and the Carnegie Hall Cinema. I'd read and re-read Eisenstein and Poduvkin. I'd even worked as an assistant when my best buddy - a cinematographer who'd learned his craft in the porn industry - began making 16mm, short, dramatic films of his own.
It would take too long to tell you exactly how it happened, but two years after I saw the first faces from Black River Falls, I met a young guy in New York who worked as an apprentice film editor for a production company. He and his uncles were all that were left of a big family of Dutch diamond cutters who'd been rubbed out by the Nazis. Since a lot of my relatives had gone up the chimney too, we had something to talk about.
He introduced me to a guy who was getting rich making commercials that panned across packs of cigarettes and soda bottles as if they were as big as trees or buildings. For the price of three file clerks' annual salaries, the guy said he'd make a five-minute movie of all Van Schaick's pictures. I didn't have the money.
Even if I'd had it, I wasn't sure that five minutes of fluid-mounted macro zooms would do the trick. That's why I made a book. Please understand, though: the book I made, I made as if it were a movie. A strange kind of movie, of course, more like a perpetual motion machine with no moving parts than a John Ford western.
The book was made to move rhythmically and incrementally, like a Gamelan concert; it relied on the viewer/reader to decipher - and participate in - its coded progressions as if they were elements of a collage built like a raga.
John Cage and William Burroughs were as much its godfathers as Max Ernst and John Heartfield. Minor White and Ralph Gibson's photo sequences had as much an influence as Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding. James Marsh is an artist. He found the book and the book found him. He made Wisconsin Death Trip into the movie it was.
• James Marsh's Arena film Wisconsin Death Trip, adapted form Michael Lesy's book (University of New Mexico Press, $29.95), will be shown tomorrow night at 10.10pm
