Dawson City: Frozen Time is a 2016 documentary feature directed by Bill Morrison.
It is about the Dawson Film Find
, the discovery of hundreds of reels of old silent films in Dawson City, Yukon Territory. In the silent film era Dawson City was the last stop for film distribution. Films that were made in Hollywood were distributed all over North America before ending up in the old Klondike Gold Rush boom town in the Canadian far north. Most producers were uninterested in bringing the film reels back, so they stayed in Dawson City. When silents transitioned to talkies, theater owners in Dawson City destroyed the bulk of their huge stockpile of silent films.
However, some 533 reels of silent film footage were used as landfill to fill in a swimming pool. Nearly fifty years later those films were unearthed by a construction project. The unearthed reels included not just the only surviving copies of several silent films previously thought to be lost, but also contemporary newsreel footage, such as the only game footage of the infamous 1919 World Series and film of labor protests after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. The documentary recounts not just the stories of the unearthed films, but also the story of Dawson City and the Klondike Gold Rush.
Tropes:
- Chekhov's Gun: The film mentions the construction of a multi-use indoor swimming pool and skating rink and how the swimming pool caused a bump in the ice. Much later that is explained to be why the films of the Dawson Film Find were buried in the first place—when the old swimming pool was filled in, the film reels were used as landfill.
- Documentary: Of the Dawson Film Find and the old movies discovered, but also of the history of the town and the Klondike Gold Rush.
- Extra! Extra! Read All About It!: A clip from the Dawson find of a newsboy hawking a paper with the words "Extra! Extra!" is used to introduce the newsreel section of the film.
- Gold Fever: A significant chunk of the film is about not the Dawson Film Find, but the original Klondike Gold Rush that created the town. A town of 30,000 people sprang up almost instantly, only to be mostly emptied when a new gold strike was reported in Nome, Alaska just a year later.
- The Ken Burns Effect: Almost all of the still pictures in the film are panned and/or zoomed. Also a Discussed Trope as this film mentions award-winning Dawson City documentary City of Gold, and how the makers of that film invented The Ken Burns Effect.
- Narrator: There is no spoken narration. Instead the film makes extensive use of on-screen captions to tell the history of Dawson City and the discovery of the film.
- Open Secret: The film notes that the presence of the old silent film reels at the site of what was once the swimming pool had hardly been forgotten in the town. Kids back in the day used to set fire to the old nitrate film reels, which would surface due to the natural freezing and thawing of the soil in the far north.
- P.O.V. Cam: One of the stock clips is a P.O.V. Cam of the path of a train over the mountains, marking the completion of the White Pass railway to the Klondike in 1900.
- Splash of Color: This trope is shown in stock footage of 1928 silent film The Trail of '98, about the Klondike Gold Rush. In the clip a woman is shown holding gold nuggets, which are hand-tinted yellow in what was otherwise a black-and-white film.
- Stock Footage: Almost the entire film. Much of it is clips from the discovered films (the most famous of which is probably The Half-Breed with Douglas Fairbanks), but there is also quite a bit of contemporary footage of the Klondike Gold Rush (one of the first historical events captured on film), as well as clips from other movies that are used to illustrate Dawson City history, like Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush or prior Dawson City documentary City of Gold.
- Talking Heads: Only two. Virtually the only part of the film that isn't stock footage is an interview of husband and wife Michael Gates and Kathy Jones-Gates, who describe their work in unearthing and preserving the discovered footage.
