A mesmirizing movie of film, pop culture and Canadian history, “Dawson City: Frozen Time” slipped by many of us when it earned film festival circuit and limited release back in 2017. But its beauty and breathtaking ambition make it a must-see for any film, history or film history buff, especially those with love, appreciation or at least tolerance of silent cinema footage — much of it damaged.
Writer, director and editor Bill Morrison tells us the history of Dawson City, Yukon, the Yukon Gold Rush of ’97-99 and the First Nation people that displaced, of different types of film stock, the 1919 Black Sox baseball scandal and early shakers and movers of the cinema who had a connection to this mining town in the middle of nowhere.
And he does it without voice-over narration, just with archival film footage of the place, including rare documentary clips of the “stampeders” hiking up mountain passes to get to the gold fields, and with hundreds of excerpts from silent films, many of them discovered at Dawson City, buried in the permafrost, back in 1978.
These “Dawson Film Find” clips are both appreciated for what they preserve — footage of the controversial “fixed” 1919 World Series, early melodramas and Westerns, early appearances by future stars, footage of the ships and boats that transported miners to Dawson City, most of whom soon dashed off to Nome, Alaska, for the “next” gold riush — and serve the purpose of illustrating the long, meandering narrative Morrison relates — of how the films were “lost” in the first place, why they were buried, and the chain of events that led to their discovery.
Early cinema history was a flood of films shot and released by a vast array of distributors small and large. Shorts, serials, documentaries and features poured out to a public starved for cheap entertainment in the decades before radio, TV and the electronic home entertainment revolution that followed.
Casual filmgoers might have heard of the perils of silver nitrate film stock, the highly-flammable celluloid that early movies were filmed and projected in before safety film took over in the ’50s, generations before the digital media revolution. Fires, deterioration and the fact that “intellectual property” didn’t have the perceived value back then means that most — 75% is a figure tossed around — of those silent (pre-1929) films have been lost.
But silver nitrate was as luminous as it was volatile. And as caches of these ancient films turn up in barns, private collections, in far off New Zealand, North Dakota or Canada, it’s obvious that it was pretty damned durable for something that could explode into flames, pretty much on its own.
Morrison goes to pains to identify the parade of images he cut together to form and animate his “narrative,” making special note of the “Dawson City Film Find” titles in the lot. Some 373 titles, most of them “lost,” were discovered during excavation of an old town hockey rink.
But the “lore” of the place is “Frozen Time’s” real appeal — the chain of events that drew thousands there, so many that the town eventually boasted several early cinemas showing silent movies “at the end of the line” of film distribution. The distributors didn’t want to pay to have the reels shipped back. So into assorted stashes, dumped into the ice-clogged Yukon River and even a bonfire (covered by the local newspaper) was the fate of all those unwanted reels, which date from as early as 1910.
We learn of the first Trump on this continent’s arrival to open a brothel, of the silent film actor and director William Desmond Taylor’s banking job in the boom town, before making his way to Hollywood where his 1922 murder became one of the great early scandals of Tineseltown.
That kid drawn to Dawson, stuck delivering papers for a living? That was Sid Grauman, who’d see his first films in the Yukon and make his way to Hollywood to open elaborate movie palaces, most famously Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
Robert W. Service, “the Bard of the Yukon,” spent time there, writing a novel in Dawson City that Hollywood would film in the late ’20s.
Another movie theatre chain owner, Alexander Pantages, showed up in the gold rush town, worked in the local opera house until he managed it, started showing films in the Orpheum there before moving south and laying the foundation for his Pantages cinema empire in Seattle.
It’s fascinating history, most of it related with still (glass plate) photos and silent footage of a place and a time, or that screened in the place at that time.
Sure, “Frozen Time” is something of an overreach, tackling so much history and too many topics to do justice to them all. But it’s absolutely absorbing, a must-see for silent film and early movie history buffs.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Michael Gates, Kathy Jones-Gates, Charlie Chaplin, Sourdough Sue, Chick Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Mary Miles Minter, August and Louis Lumière and Thomas Edison.
Credits: Scripted, edited and directed by Bill Morrison. A Hypnotic Pictures/Kino Lorber release on Tubi, Apple TV+ and Kanopy.
Running time: 2:00
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