Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016)

DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Bill Morrison
This might be the ultimate found-footage movie, because the found footage in question is real. In 1978, a backhoe operator digging up a vacant lot behind a casino in Dawson City, Canada, unearthed a trove of nitrate film reels, all dating back to the silent era and all of them long believed lost. How the movies got to such a remote outpost, why they stayed there, their miraculous survival and accidental recovery, is the subject of this documentary, a story of hardship, greed, opportunity, shifting fortunes, a hockey rink, a swimming pool, a library and the Klondike Gold Rush. It's told with titles rather than a voiceover narration, using neatly edited clips from the found films, and Alex Somers' hypnotic musical score is an eerie match for the decaying images on the screen. If there's a counterpoint to the elation that goes with a find like this, it's knowing that many more reels, hundreds of them, simply went out with the trash, burned or thrown in the river ages ago, the films they contained, like the gold in the Yukon, gone.