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Monday, June 27, 2022

DAWSON CITY : FROZEN TIME

A treat for historically-minded film Geeks/probably a bit of a bore for non-believers.  This enchanted documentary tells a double story, largely thru found footage, of the life and times of Dawson City, a boom-to-bust Alaska Gold Rush town big enough at its peak to support three cinemas between the prospectors and service community of the early 1900s.  So while we concentrate on fortune’s folly in the first half, the second picks up on what got left behind.  Specifically, hundreds of damaged cans of silent nitrate film (many fragments of ‘lost’ features) used as landfill, then, decades later, accidentally recovered.  Told by Bill Morrison in an elegiac tone of mournful uplift, it’s elegantly constructed out of excerpts from fictional silent film that match moments of Gold Rush days, historical still photos (many from original glass negatives), along with home movies of the town over the years, a few modern interviews with the celluloid rescue heroes, and tantalizing resurrections of surviving reels from the pits.  Not just feature film, but surprises like news footage of the infamous Chicago Black Sox.  It all happened because Dawson City was an end-of-the-line distribution stop.  Why return commercially exhausted product?  It certainly burns easily enough for quick disposal.  (Nitrate film will continue to burn under water.)  Much was destroyed that way, more simply dumped into rivers.  But hundreds of reels became landfill, a sleeping repository for pieces of time, cinematic history.  Much is irreparably damaged, much still gravely beautiful.  With even the film grain telling part of the story.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: A late silent epic, THE TRAIL OF ‘98, gets a fair amount of play since it’s all about a town like Dawson.  Never lost, it happily survives in fine shape.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-trail-of-98-1928.html

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