The treasure trove of lost cinema history found buried under a Canadian ice rink
Ever since humans have existed, they have documented their way of life in any way at their disposal, but the key difference between cave drawings and paintings and celluloid is that the latter really gives us a moving, emotional and far more relatable glimpse into the recent past that we can watch on film again and again.
Although what film remains from the late 1800s and early 1900s is invariably silent, it is still a fascinating document of a world that changed beyond all recognition over the course of 100 years, but the problem with the majority of it is that, before the 1950s, it was recorded onto nitrate rather than acetate, meaning it simply rots away if not kept in carefully monitored conditions.
Any major discoveries of old film from around that time are unfortunately often not viewable due to that degradation, but one find in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada, in 1978, proved different. Almost 400 different film titles preserved on 533 silent reels were discovered, which had originally been buried under an ice rink back in 1929 and had survived so well due to the permanently frosted soil above and below them.
Once historians had their hands on the film reels, they were amazed at what had been unearthed by the construction site: lost movies featuring famous stars of the past, including Fatty Arbuckle and stuntman extraordinaire Harold Lloyd, plus newsreels reporting on events of the time, and footage of sports, including the notoriously fixed 1919 baseball World Series.
Fittingly, Dawson City was one of the towns involved in the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1800s, when thousands of prospectors headed to the region after news of the discovery of gold spread to large US cities like San Francisco. And for one filmmaker, Bill Morrison, the digging up of the old movies brought a similar emotion, as he sifted through all of them, one of the first people to do so, and eventually fashioned them, even those that were starting to rot, into his own avant-garde piece of film called Decasia, which was released in 2002.
Watching the film back is a fairly unnerving experience; the people shown in different walks of life are all long gone, and the decaying of the film treats them as though they are ghosts that should really be laid to rest, almost pushing back against their discovery so many decades later. The nitrate films, which showed a period of time between around 1903 and 1929, were also unusually flammable, prone to self-combusting, and so had to be treated incredibly carefully while being transported to specialist labs.
The reason for all of the film reels being there in the first place is also an unusual one, as the local Carnegie library had some 500,000 feet of film sitting unused in its basement, while the local swimming pool was being turned into an ice rink. They were unable to get the rink to have an even temperature, however, and one inventive local decided to use the stacks of reels to prop-up the centre section of the rink in order to get a consistent temperature across it. Of course, that also solved the problem of the possibility that the film might burst into flames in the library at any moment.
Many years later, the buried films even survived a fire that destroyed the vast majority of the complex sitting on top of it, and thanks to that the historians were able to look directly at the past and witness events that were thought to be long gone forever; a bombing on Wall Street in 1920, race riots in 1917, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, racing his patented hydrofoil boat at more than 70mph on a river.
Morrison would later expand his work on the films to a documentary in 2016 called Dawson City: Frozen Time, which expands the viewable footage to a two-hour run time, and was able to call on the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós to provide a soundtrack because they were fans of Decasia.
