Dawson City: Frozen Time (film group essay)

Dawson City: Frozen Time

　

　

1.

Film is fragile. Anyone who has ever threaded a movie through a projector understands this. If you are my age, you will recall Phy Ed teachers anxiously winding hygiene films into antique projectors. These machines sputtered and coughed like old men and, when the film stuck, as inevitably happened, the screen darkened with the apocalyptic blisters and char of melting cellulose. The old nitrite-based films were worse – they burned explosively when ignited. In the process of threading the projector, some frames were usually lost. Old-time projectionists were skilled a splicing together movies that had worn and frayed to the point that they ruptured during showing. When I began seeing foreign films, for instance, from the twenties and thirties, the pictures were shown on damaged 16 millimeter prints that were grooved with scratches and, on which, bright parts of the image flared wildly like exploding supernovas – a sign of decomposition in the film itself. I saw films like Renoir’s The Grand Illusion and Pabst’s Three-penny Opera on 16 mm with sound tracks so severely degraded that it seemed that all of the characters were merely murmuring to themselves – orchestral sound cues emerged as tinny, remote, grotesque.

David Pierce at the Library of Congress estimates that 76% of American films produced between 1912 and 1930 have been lost. Of course, most of this stuff was junk – although even a trashy movie from 1922, as an example, often contains invaluable clues as to film production styles and techniques and social mores existing when the movie was made. Among the list of lost silent films are dozens of pictures by John Ford, as well as movies by F. W. Murnau, Tod Browning, and Maurice Tourneur. Silent pictures were particularly ravaged by obsolescence – when sound became universal, studios just threw away silent pictures, many of which had become fire hazards by reason of their decay into unstable and volatile gunpowder-like compounds. But the problem did not end in the thirties. Martin Scorsese became a zealous advocate for film preservation when he discovered that good prints of several of his early films could not be found. Wim Wenders best film is probably In Lauf der Zeit, a movie about a film projectionist and his side-kick wandering through small-town Germany and laboring to splice together badly damaged prints of American Westerns to show in those cities. The movie was made in the mid-seventies and by 2000 Wenders remarked to his friends that he had not been able to locate a version of the film, his masterpiece, sufficiently clear to be screened. This means that movies made when I was a boy or, even, in college are silently rotting away in film archives and, therefore, lost forever.

(Parenthetically, I note that this problem is particularly serious in developing nations. There were a half-dozen or more estimable directors working in India in the fifties and sixties. Several of these directors are said to be on par with Orson Welles with regard to their inventiveness, skill, and technical proficiency. Some of these movies (by these directors) circulate today on DVD’s that look like they were recorded off 8 mm. film shot in an actual movie theater by a camera haphazardly aimed at the screen and, then, transferred to DVD – almost all of India’s notable films produced in the post-war period and before 1980 seem to be, for all intents and purposes, lost. A film is effectively lost when it can no longer be shown to a non-specialist audience due to image degradation.)

Studio archives are also crammed with mismatched reels, fragments of film that no one can identify today. Half the silent film footage archived by the major Studios is either "unidentified" or "inadequately identified". This means that audiences can see a few minutes of film, often startlingly beautiful, but have no way of identifying what they are seeing. Periodically, fragments of film are screened, sometimes for the general public, and those watching the movie are invited to call out any features that they consider diagnostic as to the identity of these pictures. Most film schools now offer courses in "film archaeology" – the sciences of analyzing, conserving, and identifying stray pieces of footage representing our cinematic heritage. (Two of the most sought-after silent films are 1927's London after Midnight and the 1917 Cleopatra starring the famous "vamp", Theda Bara –this actress (her stage-name is an acronym for "Arab Death") was extremely notorious but, aside for a few frames none of her movies exist today; the discovery of Cleopatra or any of her feature films would be an enormously important event. Similarly, Lon Chaney’s London after Midnight, directed by Tod Browning, also exists only in form of a few feet of footage together with many still photographs taken on set – by the evidence of these frames, the movie was extremely stylishly made and featured a great performance by Chaney.)

If you care about film as an art, you must care about film restoration.

　

2.

Every few years, a trove of lost films is discovered. These troves are found in remote places, at the ends of line for film distribution. I am told that there are several canisters of 35 millimeter film at the old Paramount Theater in Austin. When the theater closed, no one sent back the last couple movies shown at the Paramount. The doors were shut and the enterprise was out-of-business. Are there films previously thought lost here in Austin?

Prisons and insane asylums have been places where many lost films were rediscovered. When a movie had lost all commercial value, the pictures were loaned to hospitals for the insane and penitentiaries. No one expected the return of these films and, after being shown, a couple times, the films were just put away on a shelf somewhere. (The director’s cut of Carl Dreyer’s masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc was found in a madhouse in Oslo.) Archives of old films also are found in small and remote towns from which the cost of shipping the movies back to the studios was more than the value of the pictures themselves. This brings us to the Dawson City film find.

Dawson City is a town in Canada’s Yukon territory. Gold mining made the town boom in the Klondike Gold Rush. As the mines played-out, the town shriveled. Dawson City is literally the end of the road – it’s the place where the highways stop and the vast Arctic wilderness begins. Throughout the first quarter of this century, the town was big enough to support two movie theaters, the Orpheum and Arctic Brotherhood Hall. It took movies a long time to reach Dawson City. Films played in that city a couple years after they were premiered in Toronto or Hollywood. By the time the movies had reached the end of the distribution chain in Dawson City, they were obsolete and had no further commercial value. It was too expensive to ship the films back to the studios and so they were simply abandoned, left to decay in stacks in the theaters. But these were nitrate films and highly flammable. Accordingly, the pictures couldn’t be safely stored indoors. Therefore, a hole was dug and they were buried.

In 1978, an old hockey rink in Dawson City was replaced. The rink was weird. Sometimes, blackened lengths of film stock would emerge through the ice. When the children put matches to the film, it exploded like a charge of gunpowder. During the replacement of the hockey rink, 533 reels of film were unearthed from the perma-frost under the rink. The cold had preserved the film so that most of it was legible – the images, when projected, although damaged, could be read and interpreted. This is the so-called Dawson City Film Find and the subject of Bill Morrison’s lyrical documentary.

　

3.

Bill Morrison was born in Chicago in 1965. He began making films from "found footage" in 1996. Morrison came to prominence with his film Decasia (2002). This experimental film derives from film footage recovered from film archives, most particularly at the University of South Carolina, storing nitrate-based film. The movie’s title is a portmanteau word combining "decay" and "fantasia". Morrison discovered that when old nitrite film decomposes, it’s rot creates spectacular and luminous flares on the film stock. Figures seem to move in balletic counterpoint to wild acetylene burst of flame. Generally, the rot is in the center of the film and so the viewer sees an ordinary Victorian room or a landscape with a great pillar of luminous and serpentine fire at its center. The effects is both sinister and beautiful. (Morrison’s innovative film is not without predecessors: in 1992 and 1994, Peter Depeut released Lyrical Nitrate and, then, The Forbidden Quest – these were collage films using decomposing nitrate footage. Depeut was a sort of pack rat and hoarder – after his death, a cache of nitrate movies, including some films thought lost, was discovered in his attic.)

Decasia was abstract. The film fragments were sutured together and illustrated as it were by a sumptuous symphonic musical composition written by Michael Gordon for this dance of decomposition. Remarkably enough, Hurricane Sandy flooded the warehouses on the East Coast where many of the prints for Decasia were stored. Thus, Morrison’s film suffered the fate of the movies that he celebrated in his 67 minute picture. In 2013, the Library of Congress, alarmed at what had happened to Morrison’s negatives and prints, declared Decasia an important film accomplishment worthy of preservation.

Decasia was widely celebrated when released and propelled Morrison into the top ranks of American experimental film makers. Erroll Morris told Lawrence Wechsler that Decasia might be the greatest fim ever made.

　

　

4.

Abstract art is important in several respects. It foregrounds formal aspects of an art form that we might otherwise miss. Further, it allows for virtuoso development of formal elements of art that could not be explored in depth in the context of a conventional narrative film or a conventional representational painting.

The problem that I have with purely abstract art is that once it has made its point – that is, opened our eyes decisively to some formal element of the work, it’s job is done. For this reason, abstract art, even very great work, often, seems "thin" to me – once you understand why the work was made and what formal feature, it highlights the painting or art work doesn’t have much more to say to you.

Here’s an example – consider a very beautiful abstract painting by Jackson Pollock, "Lavender Mist" at the National Gallery of Art. The painting is haunting and remarkable. But after you have looked at it for awhile, there’s not much to say – it’s gorgeous but not meaningful except in the most formal sense. Then, consider a similar field painting, also mural-sized, Monet’s "Lilypads" at the Musee de la Orangerie in Paris. The painting is as gorgeous as Pollock’s huge canvas but it also is representational – we can see clouds reflected in the water and can assess the time of day and, further, the painting exists in dialogue with a great tradition of landscape and flower painting, the culmination, as it were of the Impressionist movement. I am inclined to regard "Lilypads" as a greater painting than "Lavender Mist" because it is more meaningful, it communicates on more levels than Pollock’s formalist work.

Of course, all of this is intensely debatable, but represents my current thinking on this subject.

Decasia is macabre and eerily beautiful - but it’s most a one-trick pony. Once you’ve seen the movie and been astonished by it, there’s nothing really to say and you don’t have any wish to see the film again. It made its point and that’s that. (At 67 minutes, Decasia has always seemed to me about a half hour too long.)

Some critics note formal structures in Decasia – a dialogue between the upright or vertical (living) and the horizontal and deliquescent (2002). Others detect a kind of narrative – a ship surges across a stormy sea, writhing as it passes through shoals of rot; Sufi dervishes madly whirling begin and end the film. To the point that one observes these sorts of patterns, the film is, perhaps, no longer wholly abstract – indeed, it begins to assume a kind of shadowy narrative.

Dawson City: Frozen Time is about one-third abstract imagery and two-thirds lyrical documentary. In my view the film is a masterpiece and much more interesting than Decasia because the 2016 picture narrates not just one story, but a half-dozen stories. Here the abstraction exist in fugual counterpoint to with representational and narrative elements. It’s a greater achievement than Decasia because the picture is ultimately not just about the decomposition of volatile nitrate film but also about the people who made the pictures, the people who first watched them, the people who discovered the trove, and those who worked to preserve it. The film is warm and human and this makes it great.

　

5.

In part, Dawson City is a vision of Yukon territory and its pioneers. This aspect of the film draws on two prior sources, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and City of Gold, a poetic documentary produced in 1957.

In the early 20's Chaplin encountered some old stereoscopic images of miners clambering up the snow ladders in Chilkoot Pass – these are the iconic images of Klondike Gold Rush. (As pointed out in the movie, this gold rush was one of the first historical events to be extensively documented by early moving pictures.) Chaplin was also reading a book about the Donner Party at that time. Chaplin conceived the notion for a film about the Klondike Gold Rush, wrote the script, and began location shooting at Truckee, California in the Sierra Nevada. (Truckee is where the Donner Party was trapped and had to Winter in the high snow with lethal and macabre consequences.) Chaplin filmed sequences outdoors with 600 extras simulating the passage over Chilkoot pass with such accuracy that his footage sometimes is substituted for actual historical images of the climb over the mountain from Alaska into the Klondike territory. (It’s like Eisenstein’s images of the storming of the Winter Palace in October being used as documentary footage of the Russian Revolution – historians point out that more extras were accidentally killed and wounded in Eisenstein’s recreation of the event than in the actual storming.) Chaplin’s Gold Rush is an unlikely subject for a comedy – people starve and Chaplin has to boil and eat his boot; Big Jim, his sidekick, imagines Chaplin as a chicken ripe for roasting and eating. Gold rushes are always tragedies for most of those lured to the mining fields – the great majority of the miners, of course, found nothing and returned sick and impoverished to where they had come from.

Chaplin was the biggest Hollywood star in the twenties and The Gold Rush was the most expensive comedy ever made up to the date of its release in 1925. At that time, of course, the Klondike Gold Rush was well within living memory – it had occurred 29 years before the premiere at Graumann’s Chinese Theater. (Graumann himself was an alumnus of the Klondike gold rush as Dawson City shows.) Graumann premiered the movie with an elaborate set inside his theater built to simulate the Arctic with live seals and a chorus of "dancing Eskimo girls."

In 1957, Colin Low and Wolf Koenig made City of Gold. The film is 21 minute documentary, financed in part by the tourist bureau in Dawson City. The film was intended to attract Canadian travelers to the Yukon and Dawson. Low and Koenig made use of archival still photographs in Ottawa as well as the Eric Hegg collection, a large group of pictures showing the Canadian wilderness and the Klondike gold rush taken by the Swedish-American still photographer in 1896 and 1897. (Hegg made many of the iconic images of columns of miners struggling up Chilkoot Pass). City of Gold makes extensive use of still pictures that are explored by a moving camera, the so-called "Ken Burns effect." Burns himself saw the film early in his career and credits it with influencing his signature style. Sequences from this film are embedded in Bill Morrison’s Dawson City.

　

6.

Dawson City: Frozen Time is about memory and the past. It’s fundamental theme is how we reconstruct the past and how memory is an archive always scarred by the rot that is the decay of our memories. Just as old film is volatile, only a couple chemical bonds away from being nitroglycerine, so similarly our memories and imagination are not inert, but always decomposing into fragments only to re-composed into the stories that we tell about the past.

　

7.

Bill Morrison began to make quasi-narrative films after Decasia (2002). He also continued to make found footage short films, many of them loops set to music. (Music is an important component in Morrison’s films and he has worked with many important contemporary composers including Philip Glass). "Outerborough" shown at the Museum of Modern Art is a loop made from an 1899 68mm moving picture showing a trolley crossing Brooklyn Bridge – Morrison manipulates the images so that the trolley moves back and forth across the Bridge. "Release" (2010) is a loop showing the disappointment of a crowd of people gathered in 1930 to see Al Capone released from the penitentiary – Capone is not released. Spark of Being is a 67 minute film based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, entirely comprised of found footage. Miner’s Hymns is a 2011 film in documentary form about the hard lives of miners in England. "Reawakenings" released in 2013 is made from Dr. Oliver Sacks clinical films showing people "awakened" in asylums by doses of L-Dopa – these were victims of the great, forgotten "sleeping sickness" epidemic of the 20's, catatonic patients who were suddenly brought back to vivid, even explosive life, by new drugs available in the late sixties. The Great Flood is a feature-length documentary about the 1927 flood on the Mississippi – it’s constructed from archival footage much of it badly damaged nitrate. Beyond Zero: 1914 - 1915 (2015) is made from archival footage from World War I, set to a score by a Serbian composer performed by the celebrated Kronos Quartet.

To date, Dawson City: Frozen Time is Morrison’s magnum opus, his longest film, and the one that most closely approximates a conventional documentary.

8.

You’ve seen it happen. Suddenly, the digital image broadcast over the cable begins to break up. Sometimes, this happens when high winds are raging outside and the trees are dancing in the clamorous air. Lightning shows off the chaos beyond your windows and sirens howl and, then, the TV broadcaster on the cable, stutters and his jaw decays to reveal working beneath his face the vicious, horizontally sawing mandibles of some large insect. Eyes rain down in a cascade of pixilated tesserae. A former Miss America shudders into a haggard monster with a face blurred like a creature in a large painting by Francis Bacon. Sometimes faces become so hideously disfigured that it is impossible to look at them and you turn away in utter horror and wonder: What has just been revealed?