Morrison's justly acclaimed 2016 documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time combines his gift for transforming found footage with the real-life story of Dawson City, Yukon, Canada, a community with a rich history of ups, downs and in-betweens fueled by the changing fortunes of prospectors, gold miners, transportation companies and entrepreneurs dating back to the 19th century with the Klondike Gold Rush. It's hard to think of a more appropriate subject for Morrison to take on than the trove of silent-movie footage unearthed there in the late 1970s, when the foundation was being dug for a new recreation center behind Diamond Tooth Gertie's Gambling Hall, one of the fabled pleasure palaces where miners once sought solace from their demanding labors. The find took place when a worker looked down from his backhoe, noticed pieces of film sticking up from the freshly turned earth and promptly stopped the excavation so the discovery could be investigated. It turned out that a vast number of reels had been buried for decades in the permafrost, damaged by water but free of the other forms of decay that destroy footage not fortunate enough to land in cold storage.
The material was sent to archivists and preservationists who catalogued about half a million feet of film--enough to fill more than 500 reels--from almost 400 movies made in the early decades of cinema. The copious amount of footage is explained by the remote location of Dawson City and the movie theaters it housed at various times in its early history. Films were shipped from one venue in Alaska to another and Dawson City was the end of the line, so far north that distributors saw no point in paying for return shipments of films that had exhausted their commercial potential. Much of the footage was sent downstream on a barge with the community's trash, but some of it was kept and stashed away. Lending additional drama is the fact that all the films were on pre-1940s nitrate stock, a highly combustible substance that can burst spontaneously into flame and keep on burning even when completely immersed in water. Dawson City suffered more than one raging fire sparked by the sudden ignition of nitrate film, and it's amazing to learn of the many places where it was stowed, including a defunct swimming pool under the community's beloved ice-hockey rink.
In large part, Morrison's film itself is a silent movie, illustrating the changing times of Dawson City with clips from films that were unearthed there. As the documentary shows, Dawson City became a prime destination for fortune hunters when prospectors found gold there in 1897. That part of the Yukon could only be reached via the 45-degree incline of the Chilkoot Pass, and authorities trying to impose order on the gold rush required every "stampeder" to bring along a full ton of provisions.
Despite the extreme isolation of Dawson City, its population grew to a whopping 30,000 by 1898, but shrunk to a fraction of that when the goldmines grew less generous and the army of miners was displaced by heavy equipment brought in by corporate interests. Past denizens of Dawson City include such famous figures as writer Jack London, poet Robert Service, movie-theater magnates Sid Grauman and Alexander Pantages, filmmaker and murder victim William Desmond Taylor and Donald Trump's grandfather Frederick Trump, whose success in the hotel and restaurant trade laid the basis for his family's fortune. Today around 1,500 people live in the area, sustaining their economy with income from tourism and related enterprises. The number of visitors may well increase as Morrison's movie spreads the word about the city's unique qualities.
Morrison makes marvelously artful use of material from the Dawson City Film Find, as the trove was eventually named. Some of it is American and Canadian newsreel and documentary footage show local history, from the arrival of gold-rush pioneers to subsequent developments in mining, construction, transportation, business and the lives of First Nation people in the region. Most of the clips come from fiction films made for Saturday night entertainment, however, they are repurposed by Morrison to evoke the look, feel and atmosphere that made Dawson City and silent cinema so interesting for so long. Although the clips are glimpsed for only a few moments apiece, they showcase an amazing roster of silent-era stars and also-rans, and Morrison occasionally builds montage sequences of near-identical images--men at gambling tables, women cowering in doorways, couples in romantic clutches and so on--that reveal the run-of-the-mill vocabulary of commercial cinema while still celebrating the visual vibrancy of the medium.
At times Dawson City: Frozen Time veers away from its Canadian home base, presenting footage of events as different as a New York anti-lynching demonstration in 1917, the Black Sox baseball scandal of 1919 and a deadly Wall Street bomb set off by anarchists in 1920. Excerpts from Charles Chaplin's 1925 classic The Gold Rush flesh out the potpourri, as do glass-plate photographs taken by Eric A. Hegg, a camera wizard whose vintage images almost became building material for a greenhouse before a photography expert intervened.
Although talking heads make short appearances in the Morrison film, he unfolds most of his historical narrative by means of clips and texts superimposed over the images. This reinforces the quietly contemplative atmosphere of the documentary, which is further enhanced by Alex Somers's mesmerizing music score. Entertaining and informative in equal measure, Dawson City: Frozen Time is must-see viewing for anyone interested in film history, cultural history, or North American history.
Director: Bill Morrison
Producers: Bill Morrison and Madeleine Molyneaux
Film Editing: Bill Morrison
Music: Alex Somers
With: Kathy Jones-Gates, Michael Gates, Sam Kula, Bill O'Farrell, Chris 'Mad Dog' Russo, Bill Morrison
Color/BW-120m.
by David Sterritt
