Drag city
An Injury to One eulogizes a man and a place.

By Johnny Ray Huston

A LIVING BEING doesn't arrive on-screen until the final minutes of Travis Wilkerson's documentary An Injury to One. Chronicling the rise and fall of an American community, Wilkerson favors stills that range from black-and-white historical materials to his own painterly contemporary color portraits of Butte, Mont.'s landscape. Wilkerson attended high school in Butte, but his film largely portrays the place as a ghost town. It's also a toxic memorial site and a still-deadly crime scene; geese that fly across the sky are soon the subject of a eulogy. The first and only breathing representative of Butte's human population is a little boy sporting a military haircut, who plays with a gun that may or may not be a toy.

One local sign declares that "Butte is the best city in America," but for Wilkerson, it's the best city to use as a model of American capitalism's destructive impulses. An Injury to One's timeline focuses on the late 19th century and early 20th century, when Butte was an electrical-era boomtown. Announcing another year's arrival via an incantatory style, Wilkerson's narration covers the discovery of copper, the emergence of the Anaconda Mining Co., and Anaconda's ruthless war profiteering and union busting. Anaconda founder Marcus Daly isn't mentioned. The sole individuals named during this history lesson are Dashiell Hammett (whose novel Red Harvest is loosely based on his alleged experiences as an Anaconda operative) and Frank Little, an Industrial Workers of the World agitator who arrived in Butte during June 1917, days after a fire had claimed the lives of 164 miners.

The battle between a deadly Anaconda and a Little man whose speeches quickly drew thousands of supporters is at the center of An Injury to One's precise symbolic framework, which gradually connects the dimensions of a Montana grave to Butte's ruined environment. James Benning and Thom Anderson are thanked in the closing credits, and Wilkerson owes a debt to both filmmakers' recent excavations of time and place. The detailed light and shadow that characterize Wilkerson's near-static shots are similar to those of El Valley Centro from Benning's "California Trilogy," while an Injury to One's overt screedlike agenda is closer to that of Anderson's urban autopsy Los Angeles Plays Itself.

Wilkerson's use of music, however, is one stylistic flourish that distinguishes his work from those of his teachers. On four occasions An Injury to One's marching timeline is interrupted by Butte miner folk songs – recorded by Will Oldham (who played a miner in John Sayles's 1987 Matewan) and others – that alternately bemoan hardships and call for revolution. The song's words aren't sung but projected onto the region's skies and hills, an agitprop tactic that encourages audience members to create the vocal melody in their minds. Elsewhere, the Dirty Three's violin-led freneticism, Shannon Wright's ominous droning tones, and instrumental passages by Gastr del Sol capture the shift from mass momentum to dead corrosion that makes Butte a drag city.

The resulting lament for a lost America – "not yet born and left for dead," to quote the narration – adds to 2003's doc dominance; placed next to its pointed arguments, current indie fictions seem particularly toothless. Critic Paul Arthur makes a similar point in a recent Film Comment review of Errol Morris's Fog of War that asserts "the rising influence of non-fiction genres." Though Arthur sticks to populist examples (Bowling for Columbine, Capturing the Friedmans, Spellbound), An Injury to One adds scope to his interest in "partisanship and aesthetic prerogative." Wilkerson's 53-minute featurette about Butte, like Anderson's epic three-hour tour of Hollywood distortions, unapologetically adopts the tone and form of a lecture.

Lacking Anderson's car chases and explosions, Wilkerson employs digital techniques to enliven and update his relatively static source materials. There's a dichotomy at play: contemporary, corporate technological tools are used to generate a socialist critique of Anaconda's "official" history of Butte. An Injury to One's solitary false note might be that gun-toting child: an emblem of Arbus-like doom, he's the equally heavy-handed opposite of beaming babies used to connote a bright future in commercials. In the first volume of his National Archive series of short films, Wilkerson bypasses such tactics for a direct dialectic. Beautiful at first, swooning aerial shots slowly take on a sinister meaning – each audience member is locked into the point-of-view of an American bomber. No words or symbolic stand-ins are required: the footage proves that any war against a country is actually a war against the planet.

'The Form of History: 'An Injury to One' and More,' with Travis Wilkerson in person, plays Thurs/4, 7:30 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Screening Room, 701 Mission, S.F. $3-$7, (415) 978-ARTS. Go to www.sfcinematheque.org for more information.