Asylum Clerk, Crying Woman, Mourning Woman, Undertaker, Dead Boy, Hanging Man, Abandoned Boy, Coffin Girl, Drowned Girl. And this level of personality extends to the performances of all involved. The cast go about their insanities with mostly expressionless, blank faces. Holm's narration is similarly monotonous.

And yet, or mostly because of this, the viewer, especially if the viewer is The Duke, is mesmerized, feeling very real, very potent emotions even when those responsible are no more emotive than a rock placed suggestively by a thorn-bush.

The black-and-white photography is stunning, ethereal, and the transitions from authentic photographs of the period to staged re-enactments are seemless.

And what about those photos? Many of them involve dead folks, since the customs of the time invited the photographing of corpses in a manner which our society might deem a tad motherfucking sociopathic to say the least. Infants, immaculately dressed, fill tiny coffins. Sometimes their hands have been folded to give the impression that they are praying.

It's crushingly sad, yet undoubtedly beautiful.

Marsh punctuates each of the four chapters with color footage of modern-day Wisconsin, juxtaposing the mayor's assertion that "it's a great place to raise children" with the still-fresh footage of diphtheria-ravaged infants. We see the residents of Black River Falls attend gospel meetings, sit in retirement homes and cavort in play-parks. This self-same town that played host to a dazzling number of suicides, murders, mentally ill patrons, abandoned children, now stands as a picturesque suburban development.

At some level, the film acts as a repute to rose-tinted nostalgia, the yearning for a better time, a better time which, in this case, was filled with wayward opera singers and folks going mad for no apparent reason. A fella shoots a young lady who declines his marriage proposal, before shooting himself. A fella wades knee deep into a pond and then shoots himself. A girl throws herself into a river leaving a suicide note of sorts folded within the clothes she leaves on the shore. "This is my dress", she writes. "Goodbye."

It's the kind of film that I can feel tugging at my heart, man. So gorgeous, so beautiful is the world presented within these 75 immaculate minutes, that I want to be there, right now, existing forever within that haunting dreamscape.

It will remain one of The Duke's Favorite Films Of All Ever, and serves to fuel an ambition to produce something as timeless, as transcendent, as this.

Thanks folks.

Thanks Wisconsians

The Duke resides at Mondo Irlando

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