‘Dawson City: Frozen Time’ Uses A Cache Of Unearthed Silent Films To Explore The Past

Located in a remote spot along the Yukon River in the upper reaches of Canada, Dawson City is now home to about 1400. But it was once, briefly, the center of the world. Or at least the center of the Klondike Gold Rush, which for much of 1898 was and effectively the center of the world for those swept up in a moment in which fortunes and reputations were made overnight and a city carved out of virtually nothing to meet the needs.

The Gold Rush also roughly coincided with the popularization of movies, and while those two events would seem to have little in common, Dawson City tangled their histories together. In later years, when the Gold Rush gave way to mechanized drilling overseen by a single company, Dawson City became the end of the line for film distribution. Movies would play one of its two theaters then prints would remain in town since distributors didn’t want to pay the cost to send them back.

Studios and distributors in the silent era saw movies as products that had no value beyond their initial run, which goes a long way toward explaining why 75% of all silent films are now lost. Were it not for Dawson, that percentage would be a tad higher. While many films ended up getting thrown out with the rest of the town’s garbage — which was set on ice floes and allowed to float downstream — some remained stored in the town’s library then, later, used to fill in a disused swimming pool. And there they remained for decades until uncovered by a backhoe as part of a construction project, preserved beneath permafrost that helped keep their volatile nitrate from combusting.

It’s a fascinating story, one that would easily lend itself to a fine traditional documentary. And while director Bill Morrison bookends Dawson City: Frozen Time by talking to those who made the discovery and laying out what it means, he has ambitions for the film that make it far more compelling than a more traditional approach could — while remaining just as informative.

Set to a moody score by Alex Somers, Dawson City recounts the history of Dawson using archival photographs, home movies, overlaid titles and, most poignantly, film clips that reflect moments in the town’s history. A few are from contemporaneous movies like Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, but most are from the 500 or so films recovered in Dawson, and bear the distinctive water stains of all the films in that cache. What emerges is a portrait of a place largely assembled from how it saw the world — and how those movies reflected life back to its residents.

The effects become entrancing. A few key characters emerge and reappear at key moments — an apple seller, a Native American chief, a girl who works at a photo studio — and Morrison touches on some key figures with ties to Dawson City and the surrounding areas, including theater owner Sid Graumann; director William Desmond Taylor, whose 1922 murder remains one of Hollywood’s great unsolved mysteries; and a brothel owner named Frederik Trump whose grandson would later become president.

Trump didn’t operate in Dawson City, but the Gold Rush helped make his fortune, and his cameo helps reinforce an underlying sense that the past reverberates through the present. Much of Dawson City: Frozen Time, however, suggests that those reverberations originate in a past we can only know in fragments. Movies may just be just over a century old, but even beyond the fact it focuses on artifacts dug out from the ground, Morrison’s film feels like an act of archeology, uncovering another way of living and another way of seeing the world. Some of these films, for instance, gave the Dawson City residents their first glimpses of India or Africa or New York City, places they knew only from books or newspapers, if they knew them at all.

In its most magical stretches, Morrison puts viewers in their place, if only for a moment. It also lets viewers get swept up in the life of the town. It’s hard not to grow attached to the theaters where these movies played, and not to be a bit hurt when they crumble and burn as the years drag on and Dawson City’s fortune falls with the emptying of the gold mines. The film moves at a stately pace, but that just makes it cumulative effect all the more powerful. Time had its way with Dawson City as it has its way with the rest of the world, but there’s much to learn, and beauty to see, in what’s been left behind.

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