In 1978, in north-west Canada’s Yukon territory, construction on a new recreation centre was under way in a small rural settlement called Dawson City. As bulldozers tore up the ground where the previous sports hall had stood, a remarkable discovery came to light: hundreds of reels of ancient nitrate film. Some 533 silent films were recovered, including newsreels and features of all types, dating from the 1910s and 20s. Most were previously unknown to film scholars or thought to be totally lost. But for 49 years the inhospitable cold of the Yukon landscape had safely protected the films – which had been found at the bottom of an old swimming pool.

Film-maker Bill Morrison has pieced together some of these cinematic relics into a sprawling, hypnotic rumination on a long-forgotten past, called Dawson City: Frozen Time. Morrison, whose previous work includes the acclaimed found-footage essay Decasia, explains the route the footage took from building site to the Canadian national archives in Ottawa – transported by a Hercules military aircraft after civilian courier firms refused to deliver what they considered dangerously flammable material. Morrison says he first heard about the footage as an art student in the 1980s. “It became a story that archivists told – a wonderful almost-folktale. But it was all word of mouth. There was only one article written about it in the mid-80s.” he says. “Now, most people my age or younger have never heard of it. So I do think cultural memory has a shelf life of eight to 10 years and then people forget.”

Dawson City: Frozen Time makes a gargantuan effort to reinvigorate that memory, giving us a vivid account of the Klondike gold rush of 1897 and tracing the changing geography of Dawson City during its most colourful years. It achieves this largely through footage from these lost reels of nitrate, but uses still photographs and other archival material to further illustrate the period. Morrison’s film incorporates another lost-and-found tale: a collection of astoundingly evocative photographs taken locally in the late 19th century by a man named Eric Hegg. Hegg left 200 glass-plate negatives, deemed valueless, as insulation in the walls of his Dawson City photography studio. They were only rediscovered in the 1950s.

Big-shot cowboys of the day and showmen could relive past glories one last time by going up to Dawson City in 1898

In its turn-of-the-century heyday, Dawson City was a town of wild frontier capitalism, all boom and bust, based on rumours of gold. Buildings, shops, and movie theatres burned down and were rebuilt at a furious rate. Whole businesses upped and moved away, chasing the next opportunity. And somehow, in spite of all this, the town’s stock of fragile glass-plate photo negatives and nitrate film survived the years of upheaval – though with considerable water damage.

Morrison’s project also focuses on the growth of the fledgling motion picture industry in Dawson City, turning up some fascinating connections between the “stampeders” who went looking for gold in the Yukon and the hustlers and showmen who conquered Hollywood. In the brief period between 1896 and1899, when thousands descended on Dawson City, both Sid Grauman (the impresario who build LA’s famous Grauman’s Chinese theatre) and vaudeville tycoon Alexander Pantages lived and worked there. Silent film director William Desmond Taylor also spent his formative years in the town.

Front row … Mae Marsh and Walter Miller in DW Griffith’s Brutality, 1912. Photograph: Kino Lorner/Everett Collection/Alamy

“It was 50 years after the original California gold rush,” says Morrison, “so it was the end of the American frontier. Whatever, big-shot cowboys of the day, the showmen, they could all go relive their past glories by going up to Dawson City in 1898 for one last summer. Those same type of personalities recognised Hollywood as the next new frontier where these fantasies could be created and lived out.”

Although motion pictures soon became a primary form of entertainment for the captive audience of Dawson City miners, studios soon realised that there was no money in having their film reels shipped back to them. Dawson City was so geographically isolated that it was the last stop on the film distribution line – meaning that films arrived late and screened late (sometimes by years). As the reels stacked up, many were burned in bonfires or chucked into the river. Only a fraction of the nitrate silents were wheelbarrowed into the soil of that fateful filled-in swimming pool.

As film was brought out into the hot August sun of 1978, that change in temperature was almost lethal for the emulsion

The damage to the footage is distinctive enough today to be known by some archivists as the “Dawson flutter”. Morrison explains: “As the film was brought out into the hot August sun in 1978, that change in temperature and humidity was almost lethal for the emulsion. It started dripping off. So those clear spots where there’s no emulsion registers as these kind of fluttery white fingers.”



Morrison’s film deploys these damaged fragments to haunting effect, laying bare the fragility and impermanence of a young art form. A highly combustible material, nitrate film degenerated and in some cases ignited spontaneously, leading to fires that destroyed countless numbers of silent films. Although safer types of film had been invented as early as 1910, Hollywood continued to use the cheaper nitrate stock. In many ways, the negligence of the film industry mirrored the damage done to the Yukon by the gold rush miners: both were stories of opportunity and innovation coloured by tragic carelessness.

Haunting … Mary MacLaren in Bread (1918) directed by Ida May Park. Photograph: Kino Lorner/Everett Collection/Alamy

“The more research I did, the more I started to find parallels between the newsreels and the town throughout history. It became more of a tale about the American 20th century,” says Morrison. In a town erected for quick profit, where nothing was built to last – least of all disposable motion picture film – a time capsule was unwittingly buried beneath the ice, of immeasurable value to everyone.