A touch frustrating in that there are threads here that are so deeply fascinating to me as someone invested in film history and preservation but they're buried amongst historical noise that I think could have been so easily streamlined. I'm most familiar with Morrison's more tone-based works like Decasia which present eroded film strips in an unvarnished manner to create an offputting look at our cultural memory vanishing before our eyes. Often paired with a droning score, these films really do viscerally stir me, but in Dawson City Morrison seems willing to try directing something more traditional in its exploration of one Canadian town's history from the Gold Rush to a sort of endpoint in early film distribution to its eventual uncovering of thousands of nitrate film strips decades later. There is no narration in this film and very little audio aside from an ambient soundtrack, sound effects, and the one talking head very briefly scattered in the beginning and end. As a result, much of the information in this film is presented in short sentences which I felt myself growing a bit tired of in such a long runtime. More than once throughout this film I felt like I wasn't watching a documentary and I was instead watching a video you would sit at in a museum playing in a dark room. This isn't to the film's detriment per se but it's also not to its benefit. Much of the first hour is spent elaborating on Dawson's economic beginnings, the various entrepreneurs who crossed through its borders, and its eventual settling by those not caught up in the Gold Rush enough to move away the moment word spreads of a more fertile area. The second half starts to feel more like I had expected/wanted from this as we are shown the very films pulled from the grounds of Dawson City in the late 1970s which vary from mostly legible to completely succumbed to all manner of decay. There's a few narrative themes Morrison returns to throughout this that I found intellectually very stimulating: an overview of nitrate film and its volatility, a mirroring of the decay of Dawson City with the films buried under its soil, and the fragility of both our cinematic memories and the spaces we hold so dear to our hearts. But watching Dawson City in the moment at times feels like an exercise, like watching a dozen scattered thoughts litter the screen paired with eye-catching images and a hypnotic score but never feeling like it knows what it's doing in the moment. I feel like much of this can be chalked up to my own attention span, but I just really feel like a story like this needs to be told with a bit more fire in its engine. Morrison charts this discovery with an icy distance which is helpful for objective understandings but we so rarely feel the voice of someone passionate for this medium behind the camera. It's very ethereal, it's at times haunting, and I think as a whole work the good parts stand out so much more but sitting down and watching all two hours of this felt a touch exhausting.
A touch frustrating in that there are threads here that are so deeply fascinating to me as someone invested in film history and preservation but they're buried amongst historical noise that I think could have been so easily streamlined. I'm most familiar with Morrison's more tone-based works like Decasia which present eroded film strips in an unvarnished manner to create an offputting look at our cultural memory vanishing before our eyes. Often paired with a droning score, these films really do viscerally stir me, but in Dawson City Morrison seems willing to try directing something more traditional in its exploration of one Canadian town's history from the Gold Rush to a sort of endpoint in early film distribution to its eventual uncovering of thousands of nitrate film strips decades later. There is no narration in this film and very little audio aside from an ambient soundtrack, sound effects, and the one talking head very briefly scattered in the beginning and end. As a result, much of the information in this film is presented in short sentences which I felt myself growing a bit tired of in such a long runtime. More than once throughout this film I felt like I wasn't watching a documentary and I was instead watching a video you would sit at in a museum playing in a dark room. This isn't to the film's detriment per se but it's also not to its benefit. Much of the first hour is spent elaborating on Dawson's economic beginnings, the various entrepreneurs who crossed through its borders, and its eventual settling by those not caught up in the Gold Rush enough to move away the moment word spreads of a more fertile area. The second half starts to feel more like I had expected/wanted from this as we are shown the very films pulled from the grounds of Dawson City in the late 1970s which vary from mostly legible to completely succumbed to all manner of decay. There's a few narrative themes Morrison returns to throughout this that I found intellectually very stimulating: an overview of nitrate film and its volatility, a mirroring of the decay of Dawson City with the films buried under its soil, and the fragility of both our cinematic memories and the spaces we hold so dear to our hearts. But watching Dawson City in the moment at times feels like an exercise, like watching a dozen scattered thoughts litter the screen paired with eye-catching images and a hypnotic score but never feeling like it knows what it's doing in the moment. I feel like much of this can be chalked up to my own attention span, but I just really feel like a story like this needs to be told with a bit more fire in its engine. Morrison charts this discovery with an icy distance which is helpful for objective understandings but we so rarely feel the voice of someone passionate for this medium behind the camera. It's very ethereal, it's at times haunting, and I think as a whole work the good parts stand out so much more but sitting down and watching all two hours of this felt a touch exhausting.
