Dawson City: Frozen Time
A 1978 construction excavation in Dawson City (in the Canadian territory of Yukon) uncovered, beneath the permafrost, a collection of more than 500 silent films on nitrate film stock. These included footage from the 1919 World Series Black Sox Scandal and sections of lost films by Thomas Edison, Tod Browning and D.W. Griffith. Bill Morrison‘s poetic telling of this story is the most poignant rumination on the passage of time and the fragility and temporal nature of art that I’ve seen in documentary form. It conveys, concurrently, the story of the rise and fall of the Klondike Gold Rush and the story of cinema films sent there to be screened and, as it was the end of the distribution line, discarded.
In keeping with its subject matter, much of Dawson City: Frozen Time tells its stories with text accompanying images with no dialogue – including many sequences from the found silent films. The straightforward words are simple and evocative. The visuals and text are complimented by Alex Somers’ ambient compositions, eerie and haunting (though sometimes so sad-sounding you’d think discovering a cache of long lost films was the most depressing thing in the world).
Morrison’s expansive story begins with the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, where descendants of Hän-speaking people had lived for thousands of years. They were displaced during the Klondike Gold Rush, when an estimated 100,000 prospectors made their way through horrendous conditions to take claim of the gold found near Dawson City in 1896. Though Dawson quickly grew from a population of 500 to 30,000, only around 30,000 to 40,000 prospectors completed the journey; the rest gave up or died. Writer Jack London was one of these prospectors who made his way to Dawson. (Frederick Trump, the founder of the Trump family empire, owned a part brothel, part restaurant in Dawson City during this time, until local government cracked down on prostitution).
After the gold rush fever dissipated (and the extraction of gold had eventually become consolidated by one company, the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation), the town’s populace also dissipated until only 2,000 remained by 1912. Still, the town survived; The Monte Carlo palace was showing films as early as 1898; Sid Grauman, at the time a newspaper boy, saw his first film there – he later opened Hollywood’s famous Chinese Theatre and the Egyptian Theatre. Being the end of a film distribution line, films could take two to three years between the time they were released and the time they made it to Dawson.
Eventually, hundreds of films were being shown at several venues every year in Dawson, including the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association. The DAAA building had been constructed in 1902. It included a large swimming pool made from California redwood – in the winter it was converted into a skating rink. A part of the building also became the DAAA Family movie Theatre.
The film being screened then was, as most film enthusiasts know, made of highly flammable cellulose nitrate, discovered in 1846 by combining cotton with nitric and sulfuric acids. As Frozen Time tells it, “gun cotton became the standard explosive used in military warheads. In 1889, Eastman Kodak turned the explosive into a flexible plastic by adding camphor. The plastic was then coated with a light-sensitive emulsion.” Nitrate film combusts so ferociously, it even burns in water. Fires due to cellulose nitrate were frequent around the world, including in Dawson.
Being at the end of the film distribution line, the films screened in Dawson were at a dead end. The Hollywood distributors didn’t want the films returned (and when the sound era was inaugurated, tons of silent films were simply thrown into the nearby rushing river – the rest were burned in a large bonfire). Hundreds of other silent films were stored in the basement of the town Carnegie library, unused for books after a fire. It was decided, in 1929, to fill in the swimming pool under the DAAA skating rink in order to create a level surface. This seemed a good opportunity to get rid of the flammable films which had been stored in the former library; the swimming pool was filled with canisters of film, then covered with ice.
The DAAA caught fire in 1937 and burnt to the ground. Though the rink was rebuilt, the movie theater wasn’t.
Such is the power of Morrison’s storytelling that I’ll allow the documentary itself to reveal its mysteries. (It’s enough to say that even after the films were rescued from the ground in 1978, they still weren’t safe). One of the many examples, though, of the way this film expresses the rushing passing of time is in its tale of photographer Eric Hegg, who documented the Dawson City Gold Rush and stamped in time many of the images we now visualize when we think about the event. Hegg had left his collection of glass negatives with his partner, Ed Larss, when he left town in 1900.
In 1947, Dawson denizens Will and Irene Crawford, newly married, decided to relocate their cabin. Inside their cabin walls, they found the collection of glass plates Hegg had long ago left behind. Unaware of their significance and wanting to use the glass plates to build a greenhouse, Irene set about finding the best way to remove the emulsion off them. The collection was fortunately saved by Irene’s boss, who recognized the importance of the artifacts, and the 200 plates were donated to a historical museum.
—Michael R. Neno, 2019 May 01