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Dawson City: Frozen Time
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Dawson’s Crypt 1. Dawson City: Frozen Time – henceforth Dawson City – begins with a joke. The film’s maker, Bill Morrison, is being interviewed on Canadian television about the historic discovery in 1978, and subsequent restoration of, hundreds of movies from the silent era – preserved, in varying states of composition or decomposition, by permafrost beneath a demolished building in Dawson City (the capitol of Yukon territory). But the TV host, in his gabbling excitement, refers to this haul of treasure as a bunch of “videos”. “It’s quite a story”, replies Morrison, politely overlooking the lack of medium-specificity … and then we cut away from the TV interview clip (in itself an incursion of garish-looking video) to the film ‘proper’. It’s kind-of a joke, and kind-of not. For this is not one of Morrison’s overtly experimental works – or if it is, to any extent, it comes wrapped, hidden inside something else. It’s a populist, accessible documentary, patiently telling the story of Dawson City: its boom days of the Gold Rush, its abandonment, its cycles of destruction and reconstruction. The documentary side of Dawson City exclaims: these lovely old movies are back! While its experimental side wallows in what can never be brought back. The project’s subtitle, Frozen Time, cagily straddles both sides of that fence. 2. 2.One of the oddest moments in Dawson City – odd to me, at least – is when it includes in its historical narrative the making and reception of a previous Canadian success story (Oscar winning, no less!), namely Wolf Koenig & Colin Low’s documentary City of Gold (1957). For some reason – copyright? – we get not an actual excerpt from that work, but a glimpse of its outtakes. Maybe the fragmentary, provisional, unfinished nature of an outtake suits Morrison’s own aesthetic purpose better than the finished product. But that’s not where the oddity lies; what’s strange is the explicit genuflection to the guy expressly inspired by City of Gold: Ken Burns of The Civil War (1990) fame. The spectre of TV is invoked once again – but this time without, it seems, irony or smug superiority. We are even treated, fleetingly, to the fine detail of that specific gesture of cultural transmission: what Burns learned from City of Gold was a particular way of animating still photographs from past times: by re-filming them not straight on (as a static, held document, the edges of which match, as far as possible, the filmic frame), but moving along them with the camera, stopping on a detail, zooming in closer or pulling further back … In other words, exactly the neurotic visual language that is perfectly commonplace in virtually every TV-style documentary or news report today, juiced up further with chintzy, faux-3D effects (separating the foreground and background planes of a still photo and setting them off on different sliding trajectories of rescaling and blurred focus … ). A weird business: in no clip shown throughout Dawson City – drawn from the restoration of the discovered, frozen bounty – is any film director identified on-screen (they are all listed in the final credits instead). It’s quite a roll call: Lois Weber, D.W. Griffith, Maurice Tourneur, Allan Dwan, Alice Guy-Blaché … But only the name of Ken Burns is spotlit. Something is askew here. 3. Also: Dawson City is kind-of a documentary, and kind-of not. On this level, there’s a major transgression of the standard, televisual convention: no lilting, authoritative voice-over narration. (The actor Peter Coyote once apprised me of the rigid code he used when recording voice-over for Ken Burns: to drop his pitch by a tone on the final syllable of each block of text, thereby signalling provisional closure.) Instead: Morrison uses text printed on the screen (the title design is by Galen Johnson, a frequent collaborator of Guy Maddin). It is assumed we need more time to read these words than we would to hear them spoken aloud; this timing becomes part and parcel of Dawson City’s aesthetic. A slow, steady rhythm of images. Dissolves in and out of written text; dissolves from one image to the next. That gradually panning or zooming re-photography of stills. Many of the archival images are rendered in slow motion. And then there’s the score by Alex Somers, plastered over the image-track virtually from start to end: often ambient in nature, a churning cycle of four chords in the manner ushered into popularity by Hans Zimmer’s music for Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998). The entire style serves not just as a unifying artistic approach but, more ominously, as a thick lacquer or lamination over the film. Like a smothering blanket. 4. Another curious (to me) aspect of the project is the extent to which Morrison will allow in ‘foreign’ elements – I mean, images that do not derive from the Dawson Film Find, today split between the U.S. Library of Congress and Library and Archives Canada. Exception is made, inevitably, for Charles Chaplin’s beloved classic The Gold Rush (1925). But not for, say, Anthony Mann’s unusual (and brilliant) Western (or better, Northern) The Far Country (1954), which is partly set in Dawson City during the same historic period. Why Chaplin and not Mann for the purposes of ironic commentary, when both films are equally fictive and artificial, making use of studio sets and other composite-picture contrivances? It’s simple: one comes from the silent era and is in black-and-white, the other has sound and colour. Nothing is allowed to disturb the tight coherence of Morrison’s aesthetic overlay. Likewise, one of the key pieces in the backstory of the accidental preservation of so much film is an item of construction and design: an ice rink with retractable tectonic plates built over a swimming pool. (This vacancy eventually became the space to be filled by whatever discarded movie-detritus was locally to hand in 1929.) No one who has ever watched movies at Christmas time can avoid involuntarily flashing onto the film that shows, with breathtaking humour and suspense, an architectural dispositif exactly like that one: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). But one assumes that it, too, would have been ruled out-of-bounds. Nothing must threaten the homogeneity of the Morrisonian whole! 5. The overall effect is funereal. A ceremony, a ritual. Of mourning? A lament for all that has been lost, all that has passed away. Morrison’s cinema tends, in principle, to be keyed to melancholia. Those people on the screen, known and unknown alike, are long deceased; the era of silent cinema, with its special visual language brought to a height of perfection, has been stamped out; the indigenous people of the region saw their land stolen and culture wiped out. Death is everywhere, even – or especially – in the seemingly jokey Chaplin clips. Dawson City, as the written narration communicates, underwent relentless cycles of boom and bust, expansion and abandonment. At different moments in its history, it was left to rot. In particular, the great, industrial machines for mining were eventually shut down and pulled out; further decay of the natural landscape resulted. The films that were finally discovered, quite by chance, by developers in 1978 were – in the poetic sense imbued by Morrison – entombed in a crypt: neglected, outmoded, forgotten. These facts are all true but, in the context of Dawson City, also all a little odd. In the eyes of the TV host who interviewed Morrison – as in the eyes of Dawson’s local community, as we see in a late ‘70s clip – the recovery of the old film reels is precisely that: a recovery, a resurrection. Cinema lives (again)! Even if it is as ‘video’ or, more exactly, digitally reconstructed computer files. But this is rarely the sense or the sensibility of Morrison’s work. As an experimental filmmaker, he is hailed as a poet of decay, of ruins; see Decasia (2002), for instance, and the reams of writing that have enthusiastically greeted it (as in the 2018 book The Films of Bill Morrison: Aesthetics of the Archive edited by Bernd Herzogenrath for Amsterdam University Press). Much of the footage in the landfill of Dawson City has imperfectly survived; it shows the wear and tear introduced by its inevitable deterioration as nitrate-based film. Great expanses of blotch, wrinkle, distortion and blackness line the frames. Digital restoration is a costly, labour-intensive task; moreover, it cannot restore what no longer exists as ‘information’ in the image. And, needless to say, many producers (on TV, particularly) who make use of footage from the silent era want either immaculately clean images, or those that have, at best, been only lightly brushed by the ravages of time – for that charming, quaint, old-fashioned effect (often accompanied, alas, by a rinky-tink piano and the mocked-up whirr of a movie projector). Morrison, as a rule, goes in the opposite direction: the more ravaged, the better. In a certain sense, he loves the decay. He appears to caress it with his slow-motion techniques, his coloration and his soundtrack; as the promotional slogan says, every frame’s a painting. A painting of ruination. There’s a punk gesture, that many viewers find appealing, of finding the gnarled, twisted, deformed beauty in these scraps. 6. Nitrate: the very word conjures, certainly for any film lover, a horrid history of flames and destruction. So many movies made before 1950 have met their auto-da-fé by simply sitting in their cans and one day, without warning, combusting. So many others have been slowly eaten away, in whole or in part, by their own juices. If it’s simply a print, a copy amongst many others, then the film might still exist elsewhere, in an official archive or private collection; but precious negatives, sometimes one of their kind, also burn in this same, nitrate-based manner. There is an entire monster-mythology of nitrate, this hideous beast that smells bad, decomposes, burns, explodes. There have been historic conflagrations of leftover nitrate film, sometimes for the most perverse reasons – such as to create the special effect of fabulous fire for some other film! (This is how, for instance, Australia tragically lost a portion of its cinematic past.) Another avant-garde filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, cleverly gave the title Nitrate Kisses (1992) to a work that (in words taken from her website) “explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture” – inflammatory, outlaw stuff. Beyond the strictly material properties of nitrate, we can observe a long tradition – especially since the 1960s – of veritable odes to cinema perishing in its own flames. An episode of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) weaves together a rapid collage (including JLG’s own Weekend, 1967) in order to suggest that cinema is both born from, and destined to return to, ashes. Both Jerzy Skolimowski’s Le départ (1967) and Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) recreate, for a big finish, the moment when a film frame gets caught in the projector gate and is set alight. And Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) sets its climactic action scene of Jewish revenge against the Nazis in a burning, exploding cinema. The Romanian writer Max Blecher was a long way ahead of this curve when he evoked, in his remarkable book Adventures in Immediate Unreality (1936), another such cinema on fire (starting in the projection booth) where even the spectators are “like calm and inoffensive batteries that explode when their charging capacity is violently surpassed”. When Dawson City asserts that “film was born of an explosive”, it partakes of this poetic tradition. 7. Morrison’s œuvre belongs, as well, to a more specific tradition within the vast sea of found footage cinema or, even more broadly, appropriation art in all media. Found footage assemblages – compilation films is another label they attract – can be raw or smooth, deliberately just chucked together or overworked to death. When Guy Debord meticulously edited up his live-motion détournements such as Critique de la séparation (1961) by drawing upon ads, news footage and fiction features, he never thought of using slow motion to exaggerate a point, or commissioning a new music score to ‘lyricise’ the montage. Hard cuts – plus an unadorned voice-track – were enough for him. In more recent decades, found footage film art has merged with a renewed archival passion – and a slicker sense of aesthetics. In the work of Morrison, Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian (From the Pole to the Equator, 1987), Péter Forgács (Miss Universe 1929, 2006), and Gustave Deutsch (his Film ist series, 1996-2009), the archive – especially that part of the archive which ‘innocently’ documents oppressive social systems in action, such as colonial rule, patriarchal sexism or wartime propaganda – is raided and ‘made strange’ through a barrage of finely wrought, defamiliairising techniques of the type I have described above. [Funereal aside: Ricci Lucchi, Deutsch and Gianikian died, respectively, in 2018, 2019 and 2026.] What has been said of Ricci Lucchi & Gianikian is true of all these filmmakers: that they aim to give their found footage the surplus value of a “ghostly and hallucinated atmosphere”. Hauntology is their watchword. The somewhat precious aspect of this loose ‘school’ was brought home to me at an art event of 2016 that inadvertently revealed the fault line between two generations of (or, at least, two divergent approaches to) found footage appropriation. When it was suggested to Ricci Lucchi & Gianikian that video essays – re-editing, treating and thereby commenting (not necessarily unfavourably!) on their work – could be especially commissioned for a seminar to be conducted in their presence, they rejected the idea out of hand; it seemed that, in their minds, it would be a violation of their art to be deconstructed in such a way. It’s an unusual kind of sensitivity in the air when second-hand images are pronounced, once more, to be first-hand and off-limits. 8. There are two types of illustration at work in Dawson City. Morrison has declared that, as he began working on the preserved footage and considering it in relation to the story of the city, he realised that he was seeing the history of (American) capitalism itself in microcosm. This leads to a certain forcing, or conceit, throughout: if the narration mentions a real incident involving money, banks, workers’ strikes, prostitution, murder, machinery, or fire, there’s sure to always be a clip that somehow provides a handy image of it. This conceit becomes more pronounced as the film proceeds, to the point of becoming annoying. It’s an opportunistic use of the archive to – on the TV documentary side of the equation – ‘tell the story’ clearly and wittily. But this is at odds with Morrison’s materialist side, his obsessive attention to the individual photograms and their texture as wide-open signifiers. Mulching these old films into a repertoire of metaphors for social history grants them a transparency that just makes them slide away into a pit of signified information. The other type of illustrative function involves the sound design by John Somers, which works in close concert with the ever-present score. Like the music, it is, at the outset, largely ambient in nature, full of sometimes barely discernible clicks and groans, clanking and murmuring – as if reaching us from a land far away in space and time. That chimes in, naturally enough, with the haunted mood. Over the complete running time, this soundscape increasingly comes to have the ‘Mickey Mousing’ or Foley function of conventional film (or animation) sound effects: steps, crashes, trains on tracks, picks swinging, and so on. The
aesthetic choice is again perplexing: as strange as it may seem to
say of a filmmaker who so frequently works with silent archival
footage, Morrison seems afraid, in this context, of any real or
extended passages of silence. And again, it’s
a smothering blanket effect. 9. It’s too easy, finally, to criticise what Morrison does here (and throughout his work) as simple aestheticisation. If aestheticisation is, in a baseline definition, the labour of turning materials into a piece of art, there’s nothing to complain about in that process; at some level, it would be (as Robert Stam once suggested) a victory, a triumph, to succeed in aestheticising anything. When people protest over-aestheticisation, they tend to be reacting against one of two things: either a matter of proportion (films that are too relentlessly beautiful, for instance, hence prone to falling into the abyss of kitsch); or a matter of appropriateness (certain subjects are too heinous to be made formally delightful). For myself, although I do find the style and manner of Dawson City rather unvaried and sometimes quite facile in its meaning-making gestures, the problem lies elsewhere: in the heaviness of its overdetermination. Too many things – the history of the city, the state of the images, the found footage trend – congeal too tightly, too neatly. There’s no room to breathe, to really look at and examine the archival remains – and no metamorphic montage-sparks between these images and the sounds and text that accompany them. And therefore, despite an obligatory reference to the Trump family fortune that has a Gold Rush origin, little suggestive connection of this ghostly, evanescent past to our present. No friction; just freezing.
MORE Dawson City: Optimism © Adrian Martin June 2021 |
