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Dawson City: Frozen Time
Directed by Bill Morrison
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“It’s an orgy for film geeks and history jonesers, to be sure.” —Michael Atkinson, Village Voice
This meditation on cinema’s past from director Bill Morrison (Decasia) pieces together the bizarre history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Located just south of the Arctic Circle, Dawson City, a former Gold Rush boom town was also the final stop for a distribution chain that sent film prints and newsreels to the Yukon. The films were seldom, if ever, returned. The now-famous Dawson City Collection was uncovered in 1978 when a bulldozer working its way through a parking lot dug up a horde of film cans.
Morrison draws on these permafrost-protected, rare silent films and newsreels, pairing them with archival footage, interviews, historical photographs, and an enigmatic score by Sigur Rós collaborator and composer Alex Somers. Dawson City: Frozen Time depicts the unique history of this Canadian Gold Rush town by chronicling the life cycle of a singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and rebirth. 2017, U.S., DCP, 120 minutes. Recommended for all ages.