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Dawson City: Frozen Time

Dawson City: Frozen Time

Hypnotic Pictures (2016)
Documentary
USA | English | Black & White | 02:00
Blu-ray
738329225476
| 1 disc
Region 1

Dawson City: Frozen Time pieces together the bizarre true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s to 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory, in Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Using archival footage to tell the story, the film depicts a unique history of a Canadian gold rush town by chronicling the life cycle of a singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and salvation - and through that collection, how a First Nation hunting camp was transformed and displaced.


Personal

Quantity 1
Seen
Added Date Dec 31, 2017 21:57:19
Modified Date Jun 12, 2022 00:34:33

Notes

Christmas 2017 gift from Gail


This meditation on cinema’s past from Decasia director Bill Morrison pieces together the bizarre true history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Located just south of the Arctic Circle, Dawson City was settled in 1896 and became the center of the Canadian Gold Rush that brought 100,000 prospectors to the area. It was also the final stop for a distribution chain that sent 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 salvation.


Part fever dream, part historical record, Dawson City: Frozen Time tells the bizarre true story of some 533 silent lm reels, buried for almost 50 years in a sub-arctic swimming pool, deep in the Yukon permafrost. Filmmaker Bill Morrison (Decasia) deftly combines excerpts from this lm nd, including rarely seen Hollywood features, with historical footage, photographs, and interviews, to explore the complicated history of Dawson City, founded across the river from a First Nations hunting camp, the Canadian Gold Rush town at the end of a lm distribution line. Propelled by Alex Somers transcendent score, Dawson City: Frozen Time is a dazzling cinematic experience, a deep dive into the connections and contradictions of the 20th century archive.

Special Features: Booklet essays by Lawrence Weschler and Alberto Zambenedetti *Interview with filmmaker Bill Morrison *Postscript *Trailer

Selections from the Dawson City Film Fund:

*British Canadian Pathé News 81A, 1919
*International News Vol. 1, Issue 52, 1919
*The Montreal Herald Screen Magazine, 1919
*Pathé's Weekly #17, 1914
*The Butler and the Maid, Thomas A. Edison Inc., 1912
*Brutality, D.W. Griffith, Biograph Company, 1912
*The Exquisite Thief, Tod Browning, Universal Film Manufacturing Company Inc., 1919
*The Girl of the Northern Woods, Thanhouser, 1910

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