Dawson City: Frozen Time by Bill Morrison (review)

Bill Morrison’s films revel in decrepitude, pairing damaged old strips of nitrate film stock with moody, minimalist scores to create a vision of the distant past at once plaintive and terrifying. Beyond Zero: 1914–1918 (2014) literalizes the destruction of war by incorporating actual decayed battle footage from World War I, while The Great Flood (2012) and The Highwater Trilogy (2006) render natural disasters stark and implacable with minimal contextualization. 2002’s Decasia may be the purest example of the Morrison aesthetic. Traces of damage from water, fire, decomposition, and decades of neglect infect the frame like a hyperactive disease, generating optical illusions that other productions spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to create. The effect’s beauty is its randomness; a crystalline Lichtenburg figure is as likely to morph into an amoebic sludge as it is a haunting distortion of an actor’s face. Yet while his films are at once an elegy for celluloid and a reminder of its frail volatility, Morrison is an archival artist, not an archivist. His work has often been rooted in the archive without bearing much trace of it; it’s historiography as exhumation, not celebration.

Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017) marks a turn for Morrison. Converting the decaying strips of plasticized guncotton that have been his primary building block into the star attraction, Morrison uses the story of a cache of silent film reels buried in an old swimming pool in the Yukon as a lens to explore the boom and bust chronicle of Dawson City, where the histories of First Nations, prospecting, politics, banking, mining, economics, sport, Hollywood, photography, literature, theater, and exploration all intersected. In 1978, a construction crew building a recreation center next to Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Gambling Hall in Dawson unearthed a trove of film reels mixed in with chicken wire, broken curling rocks, and bottles under what was once the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association, built in 1902 to be a hub of social activity. Its swimming pool became a curling and skating rink every winter.

Morrison employs many of the discovered films themselves, along with period stills (such as Eric Hegg’s majestic plate glass negatives of prospectors crossing Chilkoot Pass) and other films (like Chaplin’s Gold Rush, natch) to tell his story. Over composer Alex Somers’ somber chamber score, onscreen titles patiently and methodically narrate the Klondike Gold Rush, a three-year frenzy that saw hundreds of thousands (today, billions) of dollars’ worth of gold extracted from what had previously been the hunting grounds for the Trondëk Hwëch’in people. The population ballooned to 40,000 in and around Dawson City’s 1,600 acres before settling to 3,000 in 1910, by which point Daniel and Solomon Guggenheim had purchased most of the surrounding mines, consolidating their claims to form the Yukon Gold Company. They extracted what gold remained with huge floating dredges, and the men that remained to work them sent for their families to build a life.

All those hardworking people in the middle of nowhere needed to be entertained; the first movie theater in Dawson opened in 1910. The town, about 400 miles northeast of (and 15 years older than) Anchorage, was at the end of a film supply chain. It was prohibitively expensive to send the reels back to the studios, and there was little thought of posterity, so the reels simply remained in Dawson. In the meantime, the town served as a way-stop for several people who would go on to make notable contributions elsewhere, each of whom merits a mention in Dawson City: Frozen Time: Hegg, Jack London, Fred Trump (whose brothel, in nearby White Horse, was the origin of the Trump family fortune), Wilson Mizner (also featured in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 2008 musical Road Show), boxing promoter Tex Rickard, founder of the New York Rangers and builder of the penultimate Madison Square Garden, future movie theater impresarios Sid Grauman and Alex Pantages, actors Fatty Arbuckle...