SILENTS ARE GOLDEN
An accidental, but beautiful, ride through the days of early filmdom
Here’s a found-footage film with a twist — the footage in this film really was found, in (of all places), an abandoned swimming pool beneath a burned-down athletic club in Dawson City, Yukon.
Dawson City: Frozen Time includes the story of how a cache of silent film reels wound up there. Briefly, Dawson used to be the end of the line for movies travelling north from Hollywood. Shipping them back was expensive, so they just stayed in the Far North. No longer wanted and dangerously flammable, some were burned, others deep-sixed in the Yukon River, and 500 were tipped into the pool, which was being converted into a skating rink.
That was in 1929. The treasure trove was rediscovered by a construction worker in 1978, and the films — features, shorts and newsreels, including rare footage of the scandal-plagued 1919 World Series — were shipped to Ottawa.
The tale is worthy of its own documentary, but filmmaker Bill Morrison has other plans. Like his first feature, 2002’s Decasia, he wanted to use the footage to tell its own story, silently but for a modernist score.
The results are uneven. At two hours, Dawson City: Frozen Time is easily at least 20 minutes too long. Much could be cut from the film’s beginnings, which laboriously chronicle the history of nitrate film stock, the Lumière brothers, etc., all to a lugubrious soundtrack by Alex Somers.
Things get more interesting when we get to the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, which quickly swelled Dawson’s tiny population into the tens of thousands. They included a newsboy named Sid Grauman, who grew up to become a cinema impresario, and Friedrich Trump, a German whose lucrative brothel no doubt helped fund his grandson’s presidential campaign. (“We have come to stay,” he lied; Trump moved back to Germany in 1901.)
Morrison doesn’t shy away from using all manner of old films to illustrate the story of the boom and bust that was the gold
rush. But most of the images are credited to the “film find.” They include snippets of films about the Yukon, films shot there and some that just happened to play in one of the community’s early cinemas.
We see footage from the British War Office about how grenades are made; a dramatization of the Red Scare; documentary footage showing how mining samples could be “salted” to appear to contain gold; and news of the still-unsolved 1922 murder of director William Desmond Taylor — local news, as he and at least one suspect had spent time in Dawson City.
The result is a beautiful ride through early filmdom, and a rare glimpse at a period of cinema history that has suffered from both accident and neglect. Turns out the seemingly neglectful burial in the Yukon permafrost turned out to be a happy accident after all.