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. Discovered buried under the permafrost in a former Canadian Gold Rush town, their story conjures the forgotten ties between the fledgling film industry and Manifest Destiny in North America.
Literally, history was scorched and the city of Dawson recovered it or used it as a foundation for the benefit of its population. "Dawson City: Frozen Time" is survival from historical custody. [Full review in Spanish]
... celebrates the power of cinema as a time capsule and features clips of numerous films recovered in Dawson to help tell the story of the city and to illustrate the wonders of the world that cinema brought to the citizens in the 1910s and 1920s ...
The true magic that "Dawson City" captures is, simply, the mystery of film itself: a medium that turned people into shadows that burned brighter than life.
Bill Morrison, whose extraordinary documentary Decasia turned decomposing film stock into the stuff of avante-garde reverie, returns with another staggering journey into the past.
The thrilling documentary "Dawson City: Frozen Time" is indescribable not because it's ambiguous (it's totally straightforward) but because it does so many things so beautifully it is hard to know where to begin.
Morrison has made the only fitting tribute I can possibly imagine and the irony is not lost on me that so many films had to be destroyed for it to even exist. Put simply, Dawson City: Frozen Time is a masterpiece.
We come away with a contemplative suspicion that we're all participating in something, and even if we don't ever get to see the big picture, there probably is one and it might even make sense.
