When silent films speak of a lost past

Sometimes a film feels like an epiphany. Watching Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, currently streaming on an international film platform, had that sort of effect on me. It tells the strange and wondrous tale of how nearly 400 silent films from the early 1900s, managed to survive in the permafrost of what had once been a small-town swimming pool - emerging from the ground in the 1970s, to finally find their place in the history of humanity.Technically a documentary, Morrison's film is an exquisite assemblage of facts and footage so artfully and lovingly crafted that it feels like an epic. That epic quality comes from two historic elements – the Canadian gold rush, which originally brought Dawson City into being, and the invention of cinema, which created these thousands of feet worth of early film images, only to abandon them. What Morrison captures, without ever spelling it out explicitly, is the way the treasure trove - known as the Dawson City Film Find - offers up a conjoined history of these two lost worlds: A forgotten town and a forgotten technology.https://t.co/5SoVqyFpzN— dawsoncityfrozentime (@dcft_thefilm) 1512785929000And yet both the town and the technology were, a century and a quarter ago, part of the crucible of modernity. Morrison begins with the fact that film originated in an explosive, nitrate cellulose. The Kodak company turned it into nitrate film by adding camphor to it and then coating it with plastic emulsion. But nitrate film, on which all early cinema was stored, remained highly inflammable, and the documentary shows, over and over again, that the history of early cinema is also a history of fire. From Thomas Alva Edison's film manufacturing plant exploding, to the Solax Film Company Fire in 1919, from the repeated burning down of Dawson City's film theatres, down to the 1967 warehouse fire in which the National Film Board of Canada lost its entire nitrate film collection, the sense of tragic loss comes to be replaced by a sense of inevitability.The film is also a deep dive into Dawson: Now a small town with a tiny population of 1300-odd people (as of 2011), but once the site of a remarkable moment in world history. Gold was discovered near here on August 17, 1896, at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, near the boundary with the US state of Alaska. Over the next three years, thousands of prospectors made the extremely difficult journey to this freezing-cold terrain, often crossing snow-covered passes on foot, hoping, literally, to strike gold. During the height of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Dawson City’s population exceeded 30,000.Naturally, entrepreneurs of all sorts arrived, hoping to ‘mine the miners’, as Morrison puts it. Fred Trump opened a brothel called the Arctic Hotel and Restaurant in the nearby town of Whitehorse - the origin, says Morrison, of the Trump family fortune. Casinos were the other gig in town, as you might expect from a place full of men on the make. An athletics association building came up, with boxing matches organised for a largely male audience. Soon, there were not one but three theatres screening films.Thrilled to see Ida May Park's BREAD (1918) selected to @librarycongress #NationalFilmRegistry, two reels (R3 & R4)… https://t.co/vpvzY7FwmG— Bill Morrison (@decasia) 1608092271000But as the more accessible mines began to be exhausted, and gold was discovered some distance away in Nome, Alaska, the city of Dawson emptied out, becoming a quarter of its size in a year. Films continued to come to Dawson, but they often took two or three years after their first release, to arrive. The town was at the end of a film distribution line, and the distributors didn't want to pay for their passage back. The films were already old news. So they ended up being stored in Dawson. As the years passed, and the town's buildings started running out of space, thousands of old silent film reels were burnt, or simply disposed of in the Yukon river. A small section remained -- and the rest is history: A history whose incredible details you should watch the film for.Yet Morrison's film is no mere history book on screen. What he does is a marvel in terms of film form. He uses still images - including photographs taken during the Gold Rush by a photographer called Eric Hegg, which have their own magical history of survival and recovery - as well as newspaper articles, printed posters and archival letters. He uses newsreels from Pathe and Fox. And he combs all of this archival visual material for Dawson history, from an early instance of baseball match fixing to a real-life Hollywood murder with a Dawson connection. And of course, Dawson's connections with early cinema. But he goes far beyond using the footage as factual archive; he uses the reels from the Dawson Film Find, their edges marked by decades of water damage, to craft a magical visual history of their time. A sentence like "The years and decades passed Dawson by" is illustrated with shots of silent film heroines sleeping, as if waiting to be awakened by the kiss of some fairytale prince. We watch entranced as a series of unidentified film characters gamble, or wrestle with their lovers, or wait outside doors, eavesdropping. It feels like we're eavesdropping too, on history.Trisha Gupta takes weekly stock of what's in and out at the movies(Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's own)From the same author:Untitled Carousel 81368396Untitled Carousel 81248577Untitled Carousel 81129382Untitled Carousel 80900161