Archive aesthetics and the historical imaginary: Wisconsin Death Trip

摘要

This article looks at how one quite recent historical documentary, shown both in Britain and the United States, is organised as an exercise in knowledge and imagination, producing understanding within a strategy of projected feeling and formal pleasures. It examines the relations of space and time generated and the distinctive visual design, grounded in archive photography, used at the core of its portrayal. Noting the original and striking ways in which its dark and often macabre subject matter is articulated within a sense not only of a particular historical moment but also of a broader aesthetics of the bizarre, it raises questions about inter-generic form and function. It complements the analysis by exploring briefly how a number of newspaper and website critics assessed the film in what were sometimes conflicting ways, locating its meanings within varying framework of value and interpreting its imaginary dimension into different historical judgements.