Film burns. It melts, delaminates, molders, and rots, turning from a pasty goop to a clotted puck which every so often, and not that infrequently, spontaneously combusts and even explodes. This is not the case with all film, but it certainly applies to film made from cellulose nitrate, which means most movies made before the early 1950s, when a general conversion to acetate began. A vast amount of film has been lost to time—whole careers vaporized, entire catalogues of once-thriving studios laid waste, miles of newsreels gummed up beyond salvage.

Which explains what Bill Morrison was doing up in the Yukon a couple of years ago, 165 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in Dawson City, the hub of the late-19th-century Klondike Gold Rush. Dawson City was the site, 38 years ago, of one of the most astonishing and unexpected bonanzas in cinematic history: the chance discovery of a mother lode consisting of more than a thousand reels of nitrate film stock from the earliest days of the movie industry—virtually all of it unique and long thought lost, improbably preserved inside a permafrost landfill underneath an abandoned ice-hockey rink. This mother lode came to be known as the Dawson City archive. It is the King Tut’s tomb of early movies. Why and how it came to be found in Dawson is a story in itself.

When it comes to the relentless disintegration of nitrate film, preservationists such as Martin Scorsese rage against the dying of the light. Morrison, for his part, revels in the stuff. He laments what has disappeared, to be sure, but he also appreciates how heartrendingly gorgeous the images can look while they are in the process of disintegrating. Fifteen years ago Morrison was one of the first people to view the entire collection of restored reels, and the splendors he uncovered—the way in which the underlying imagery often seemed to be struggling to persist despite the encroachments of an equally beautiful rampaging rot—formed the basis of his 2002 symphonic masterpiece, Decasia. The film, an almost delirious braiding of sequences from decaying old movies, created in collaboration with the composer Michael Gordon, is already regarded as a modern classic. For his next film, which will screen at the Venice, New York, and London Film Festivals, Morrison had set himself to mining the rich veins of the Dawson City archive, and he had gone to Dawson on a latter-day prospecting mission of his own.

Left: Kathy Jones-Gates with film salvaged from the old swimming-pool site, where the old movies were stored and then forgotten, 1978. Right: Sam Kula (left) and Michael Gates (right) examine some of the reels. © Kathy Jones-Gates/Dawson City Archives.

Nowadays you can fly to Dawson City, which sure beats the months-long slog in thoroughly wretched conditions faced by the tens of thousands of original stampeders back in the winter of 1897–98. To get to the Klondike, most prospectors had to make multiple Sisyphean treks up and down the icy 45-degree incline of the dreaded Chilkoot Pass in order to hoist the 2,000 pounds of provisions per person required by the North West Mounted Police before they would allow an individual to continue onward. (Sly entrepreneurs like Donald Trump’s grandfather made considerable sums off the would-be miners themselves, offering everything from meals and lodging to gambling and prostitutes. The airports get successively dinkier—O’Hare to Vancouver to Whitehorse, just above the southern edge of the Yukon Territory—on through the last, hour-long leg, pretty much due north in a rickety puddle-jumper, which finally descends to the single-shed Dawson airport. Unlike Whitehorse, a generic Midwestern-like Anytown, with its inevitable cohort of chain franchises, Dawson City is surprisingly charming: a dead ringer for HBO’s Deadwood, with its grid of clapboard store fronts and wooden sidewalks, built up over a spit of once-marshy moose pasture, just downriver from where the Klondike River, with its brace of gold-flecked sidestreams, pours into the Yukon River. The sense of wandering through a movie lot is heightened by the way in which, Altman-like, the town’s denizens keep shifting roles—a waitress here turning up as the ferryboat ticket-taker there, for instance. Dawson’s population, which had collapsed from a peak of about 30,000 in 1898 to fewer than a thousand by the 1940s, has rebounded to about 1,500 year-round. With mineral prices up, there are some who still hope to extract what they can from the surrounding hills. Most of the others have in various ways taken to panning for tourists. The far side of Labor Day, when Bill and I visited Dawson City, it was a bit late in the season, but the leaves were turning glorious autumn shades on the surrounding hills (well more than a month before they would be doing so in Vermont), and the bars, of which there are considerably more than restaurants, were doing a brisk business. One of them actually stayed open 24 hours a day and had been doing so for years—it had to, because the minute it closed, there were standing orders to have the place condemned. Not a few buildings in Dawson lean drunkenly into one another, undermined by the annual cycle of permafrost melts and freezes. Several once-thriving concerns, such as the Bank of British North America, were boarded up when I was there; others, similarly abandoned, such as the one-time boarding house known as Mary’s Rooms, had trees sprouting through their windows.

If summer in the northern Yukon is brief, autumn is even briefer, and we were told that within another 10 days or so, winter would be arriving, and within weeks of that the town would be largely socked in, the wide Yukon freezing over entirely. This state of affairs likely explains why for many decades, and until not that long ago, four movie theaters thrived in this tiny hamlet. All of them have lately succumbed to the onslaught of DVDs (available for rent at Jimmy’s Place) and the Internet.