Science on Screen: Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016)

Free and open to the public

Filmmaker Bill Morrison (Decasia, The Great Flood) is renowned for his use of decaying nitrate film stock to create mysterious, haunting meditations on cinema and the past. He has an ideal subject in Dawson City, just outside the Arctic Circle. In the early 20th century, the town swelled to accommodate 100,000 prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush, and was the end of a film distribution line – once they made it to places like the Yukon, film prints rarely left. But in 1978, a bulldozer razing a parking lot made an amazing discovery: 533 nitrate film prints that had been buried as landfill for a swimming pool, preserved by permafrost. Using footage from these films, Morrison creates a swooningly beautiful reflection on film and cultural preservation, the thrill of discovery, and the enduring power of cinema to shape our concept of past and present.

Bill Morrison will be joined in conversation with Snowden Becker, Program Manager of Moving Image Archive Studies at UCLA, after the screening to discuss his filmmaking process, working with nitrate film, and more about this celebrated film collection.

For more information about the AMIA conference in New Orleans, visit the website here.

Science on Screen® at Shotgun Cinema is made possible through a grant from the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with major support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.