Bill Morrison follows the boom and bust of a Yukon gold-rush town in Dawson City: Frozen Time
DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME (Bill Morrison, 2016)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, June 9
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
billmorrisonfilm.com
“What power has gold to make men endure it all?” a title card asks in William Desmond Taylor’s 1928 silent film, The Trail of ’98, based on a novel by Robert Service. Both Taylor and Service were at one time residents of Dawson City, the town in the Yukon in Canada that was at the center of the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1890s. In June 1978, while construction was just under way to build a new recreation center behind Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Gambling Hall in Dawson, Pentecostal minister and city alderman Frank Barrett uncovered a treasure trove of motion picture stock, hundreds of silent films that had been believed to have been lost forever. Writer, director, and editor Bill Morrison uses stunning archival footage from those films in his elegiac, beautiful documentary, Dawson City: Frozen Time, which brilliantly tells the story of greed, perseverance, and the growth of the entertainment industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After gold was discovered in Dawson, the indigenous Hän people were relocated to Tr’ochëk and some hundred thousand prospectors stampeded in, the gold mining destroying the Hän’s fishing and hunting grounds. Morrison also follows the invention of film itself, celluloid stock that would end up causing many fires, including one every year in Dawson for nine years. Bookended by an original interview with Michael Gates, Parks Canada curator of collections, and his wife, Kathy Jones-Gates, director of the Dawson Museum, the film traces the boom-and-bust fortunes and misfortunes of Dawson, as gambling casinos, movie theaters, hotels, and restaurants are built, including the Arctic, a hotel and restaurant owned by Ernest Levin and Fred Trump, the president’s grandfather, that might have served as a brothel as well. The film is supplemented with photographs by Eric A. Hegg, a giant in the field who left behind glass plates when he ultimately departed Dawson. Among others making their way through Dawson at one time or another are newsboy Sid Grauman, who went on to build Grauman’s Chinese Theatre; New York Rangers founder Tex Rickard; comic superstar Fatty Arbuckle; and Daniel and Solomon Guggenheim, who dominated the mining there.
Discovery of long-lost silent films tells a fascinating story in Dawson City: Frozen Time
Morrison, whose previous films, including Decasia, The Miners’ Hymns, and The Great Flood, employ archival footage to often tell historical tales, uses thousands of clips in Dawson City: Frozen Time, from newsreels to such films as Temperance Town, The Half Breed, The End of the Rainbow, and The Frog. Footage from the found clips, identified as “Dawson City Film Find” on the screen, also delves into the evolving battle between workers and owners, the deportation of political radicals, and the Black Sox scandal, all of which Morrison relates to the upstart movie industry. The film is a tour de force of editing, as Morrison streams together scenes of actors going through doorways, kissing, or moving in vehicles, not just a torrent of random images, all set to Alex Somers’s haunting experimental score. (Somers’s brother, John, is the sound designer.) The film also sets a new personal high for Morrison, clocking in at 120 minutes, by far his longest work; all of his previous features are less than 80 minutes, but this latest one further establishes that Morrison’s mesmerizing but unusual visual approach is not time-sensitive. With Dawson City: Frozen Time, Morrison has created a magical ode to the history of film, to preservation, to pioneers, and to perseverance, told in his hypnotic, unique style. It opens at IFC Center on June 9, with Morrison and Alex Somers participating in a Q&A at the 6:00 shows on June 10 and 11, moderated by NYU Cinema Studies assistant professor Dan Streible.
Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray — the list of unarmed black men, women, and children who died during or shortly after altercations with mostly white police officers keeps growing. Erik Ljung tells the story of a lesser-known victim, Dontre Hamilton, in The Blood Is at the Doorstep, making its New York premiere this weekend at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. On the afternoon of April 30, 2014, the thirty-one-year-old Hamilton, who suffered from schizophrenia, was resting in a public park when he was roused by police officer Christopher Manney, who, after a confrontation, shot Hamilton fourteen times, killing him. The Hamilton family wasn’t notified until after midnight, more than eight hours later, then spent more than a year seeking information, and justice, trying to find out why Dontre had been killed and what was going to happen to the officer responsible. Ljung, who serves as director of photography as well, follows Dontre’s mother, Maria, and his brothers, Nate Hamilton and Dameion Perkins, as they demand answers, remaining peaceful yet strong. Ljung meets with Dontre’s father, Nathaniel Hamilton Sr., who is divorced from Maria but is still in his children’s lives, and Michael Bell, a white man who talks in detail about the murder of his son at the hands of Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer Alberto Gonzales. Also sharing their views are Hamilton family attorney Jonathan S. Safran, District Attorney John T. Chisholm, and Milwaukee police chief Ed Flynn, who is quick to defend Manney’s actions while painting a false picture of Dontre as a repeat violent offender with a dangerous mental illness. Ljung, who has done work for VICE News, Al Jazeera, PBS, and other outlets, and editor Michael T. Vollman add footage from news reports, showing how the story played out in the media as public information trickled in over months and months.
It would be easy to assume that Chris Kelly’s documentary A Cambodian Spring, about a Phnom Penh community’s battle to save its village when developers move in, was part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which begins June 9 at Lincoln Center and IFC Center. However, it is actually being shown June 7 and 11 at the Wythe Hotel in the twentieth annual Brooklyn Film Festival, which began June 2 and continues through June 11. Winner of the Special Jury Prize for International Feature Documentary at the Hot Docs International Documentary Festival, A Cambodian Spring follows two women and one man as they lead the fight to protect their homes in Boeung Kak after Prime Minister Hun Sen cancels the World Bank’s Land Management program and makes a deal with Shukaku Inc. to develop the area. The new plan is based on eliminating the large lake around which many people live, struggling to survive day to day. Leading the charge against the land grab are Tep Vanny, a born activist; Toul Srey Pov, a quiet mother who suddenly finds herself thrust into the spotlight, rallying supporters using a megaphone; and the venerable Luon Sovath, a Buddhist monk and video activist whose pagoda threatens to defrock him if he doesn’t back off challenging the government. “They said that a monk shouldn’t care about the problems of the people,” he says, referring to the other members of his pagoda, “but I disagree.” The people of Boeung Kak are mired in abject poverty; their livelihood, fishing, has been taken away from them, and now Shukaku workers have shown up with equipment ready to tear down the decrepit shacks the villagers call home. “Soon, all the poor people will be gone. Only the rich will be left,” Pov says. When self-exiled opposition party leader Sam Rainsy returns to Cambodia to run against Hun Sen, the citizenry finds new hope, but then infighting threatens their cause. “If we have unity, compassion, and trust, then we will be strong and no one will break us,” Pov explains. “But if we don’t trust each other, then how can we work together? It will all come to an end. We won’t succeed.” 
