Dawson City: Frozen
Time
Director:
Bill Morrison
Year: 2016
Rating: 7.5
People occasionally ponder what they would do if they could go back in time.
Some would want to kill Hitler, others want to witness the Crucifixion and
Resurrection of Jesus, some just want to be able to buy Apple and Microsoft
stock at their inception, maybe see your parents when they were young. But
for me, I would like to go back and save as many old lost films as I could.
Load up my time machine and bring them back. A huge percentage of our silent
films and news reels have been lost and that is to me a national tragedy.
Most of them gone forever. Beautiful images and historical moments gone as
if they never existed.
In 1976 a very small slice of this heritage was discovered in Dawson City,
Canada when a tractor uncovered hundreds of spools of old nitrate film buried
in the ground as landfill. This documentary tells the amazing story of what
led to this – taking into account the history of Dawson City from its creation
in the last of the 19th century during the Klondike Gold Rush to present
times. Over a 100,000 people came to the frozen north looking for riches
– the town quickly grew to 40,000 with bawdy entertainment being a staple
for these lonely men. But then the gold petered out, and so did the town
down to a few thousand people. But they always had movie theaters. And Dawson
City being the end of the distribution line – often showing movies 2-3 years
after they came out – they just kept the films as no companies wanted them
back. And they were stored for years but eventually burnt in fires – the
nitrate – or thrown into the Yukon River or used for land fill at the bottom
of an ice rink.
Though the film begins with the wonderful discovery of what was left of these
films, it is really a tragic tone poem to the loss of these films all over
the country through fire, negligence or disinterest. With the use of a mournful
sound track and fragments of restored film flashing hypnotically by, it fills
one with a sad longing for this loss.
Something slightly similar happened to a group of us a bunch of years back.
A HK film theater in NYC was sold and the new owner asked us to do an inventory
of all these hundreds of film reels in the basement before he tore it down.
We did. It was exhilarating to come across old films from decades previously.
To think about being able to show them somewhere, sometime – but in the end
they just sort of disappeared and I have no idea where they ended up. Criminal
having no sense of our heritage and preservation of what came before us.