Thousands of faces and gestures: 'Dawson City: Frozen Time' (2016)
I consider the people and movements frozen underground in Dawson's film find, plus a bonus about Australia's first feature.
Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016), dir. Bill Morrison, United States
On the dirt road in the middle of town, thrown up in the dust of the carts hauling sacks of powdered gold and salmon bellies, airing toothless panners’ sweat and oily overalls, a ten-year-old boy shakes his head side to side, sets free his lips like frog legs, and gets his face, just like his mother always warned, stuck like that. One cheeky eye here, a tooth there, and his sandy brown hair and freckles suddenly reign not over a charming and rubbery pluckiness, but over a terrible smudge. He vibrates like a demon among those hard-working people, his hands at his sides in a whistling dare. “Christ Almighty (forgive me!), it looks like Satan took a fat finger to hot newspaper with you! I guess that’s how you deserve to be remembered: always horsing around and making a mess of yourself.”
I saw a documentary a few years ago called Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021) about a three-minute-long piece of film taken in a Jewish neighborhood in Poland before the Holocaust. The filmmakers tried to identify the people in the clip1 and determine whether they had survived. In one sequence, portrait-sized cutouts of all the film’s faces form a grid where duplicates find their twin faces and the narration gives a few of them names. I could hardly call some of these “faces.” They were more outlines or hints, Amityville ghost boy faces (even writing this at night, at home alone, I fear that inkblot face with glowing tread eyes that Ben re-snuck into my spinal cord through group text). The sun blacked out their eyes, or another kid stood in the shot and lopped off half their heads, or they stood concealed in door frames. These faces also ended up on the grid next to smiling neighbors and I cried when I saw them together. The blurry ones almost made it into recognition, but fell back onto a phantom at memory’s cusp. There might be more legible pictures of these people somewhere else, but I could never trace these faces to them and so rescue them from their three-minute limbo.
When a man looks to his left and jumps at a woman’s hand offering itself from a cloud of water damage, I find another half-real, face-ish gesture. What thousands of faces and gestures wandered on screen at the family theater in our misbehaving devil-boy’s little town? On winter days in 1903, when the blizzards blocked up the pass to Whitehorse and the Yukon froze over, pinning its gold dust into the riverbank, he would hole himself up for hours in the new picture theater of the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association. He saw there: a suspicious cowboy dart his eyes left and right, a lacy woman giggle on a chaise longue, a pair of heavy eyes drift out bed, a girl plop herself on a couch and snort through her nose like a bull, a curious mouth twist to one side to reveal a hidden dimple—
When Clifford Thomson, the warm-faced and dapper gentleman from the Canadian Bank of Commerce, hired Coates to trudge boxes of old film reels out of the basement of the library (a Carnegie! Way up here in Dawson!) and into the hockey rink to be used as landfill—the hockey rink which, in the summer, served as the public pool, and which buckled and undulated in the winter when the pool froze unevenly, and which Thomson was officially inaugurating as a year-round rink by filling in the pool and sealing off and polishing its surface permanently—when Coates buried those boxes of old movies in 1929, the kid saw a line of young miners in A Girl’s Folly (1917) ferry boxes across a film set. When Thomson had the pool full of faces finally iced over, the kid watched a woman stare something down out a curtained window (The Unpardonable Sin, 1916), another sigh deeply and drop her tired eyes (It Happened to Adele, 1917), and a third lay down to sleep at the crest of a cliff (Barriers of Society, 1916). When Fred Elliott, the D.A.A.A. theater’s new manager, flailed to keep up with crowds clamoring for “talkies” and tossed even more boxes of film down the icy river, the kid saw the pirates in Out of the Deep (1912) haul treasure overboard to its own watery tomb. Even in 1978, when serene Michael of the parks service and the ruddy museum curator Kathy started falling in love over a permafrost full of nitrate, the kid still sat in the theater, shifting in his seat for a kiss in The Girl of the Northern Woods (1910).
Is he still there, with his floating eyes burnt white by Hearst Selig News Pictorials while I watch people amble down Eastern Parkway? A woman in a cheetah print skirt drops her phone on the sidewalk and as she stands back up, phone again in hand, she brushes her hair out of her face and her boyfriend hugs her waist. I might be the only person who saw that. If I hadn’t written it down, maybe no one would have remembered it. Of course it’s natural for those things to pass into the air. I might be driving myself to fearful hoarding if I try to keep, catalogue, and tend to every thing I notice. The hidden dimple and the bull’s snort survived sleeping under the ice only because someone captured them in the first place. Now I have to deal with their only half being here, like a bag of frozen peas. One could have let them go, like the distributors who called “end of the line!” in Dawson and chucked spools of gestures into the gliding bergs of the Yukon.
Now I have a smile like a dried flower, all spring freshness giving way to two-pronged “Why did you leave me there?” and “Thank you for coming back for me.” The dead in their new roles as auto-dramatizers can gesture back at me, but with stolen and limited life. They move in me as a carousel horse moves in circles with glazed eyes open. They dance like this ectoplasm woman, among spots of water damage in a sumptuous little theater. I really feel like I love these people. Goodbye, boy’s smudged faces and lovers’ kisses in ice floes! Goodbye and thank you, you live in my heart now.
Last fall, before I started this blog but still wanted to write something about movies to keep myself close to my own heart, I wrote about The Story of Kelly Gang (1906), Australia’s first feature film. I wanted to write like Jean-Louis Schefer; reading it again, I don’t like it because it seems like it’s trying too hard. I might read today’s entry next fall and see no difference between it and the Kelly Gang excerpt. Either way, I left it buried in my computer, but it reminded me of Dawson, so I’m sharing it with you now.
The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), dir. Charles Tait, Australia
Who is this medieval man bleeding celluloid? He scans the bush with his gun, feet planted, a stark and menacing iron wall with his eyes behind slits. When the film stock fizzes and melts he appears to go up in flames, disappearing with the cut like the Wicked Witch of the West.
He’s a crusader as he approaches two constables, stopping now and again to punch a shot. Top-heavy in his barrel he wobbles with his aim, mocking the knights of old who, too weighed down by the armor with which they displayed their aristocratic and martial dignity, fell from their horses and could not climb back to their feet. At Crécy peasant halberdiers speared them like fish.
The constables “fire into his legs,” a weak spot in his armor, and Kelly collapses. They do not spear him, but of their own accord his insides explode in rivulets of gelatin. They dance, pulsate, and unfurl. A hand gets caught in the current and clicks to the top of the frame, then darts back out of sight. A constable grabs the helmet and with a belabored yank tears it from Kelly’s head; the melting film carries the head along a taffy neck until it bounces back into place. Time and decay have rubberized the iron man.
The torture is grotesque. The film degrades as the constables handle Kelly, begging us to divert our eyes. The gore hides the wound! (In the silence that follows, the film is pristine.) And then his face emerges, a lamenting beast with its pillowy beard. Hands tear him limb from limb; even the liquid image has fingers; these do not handle but probe. It is sexual and voracious, six priestesses rubbing the Greek with oil before knifing his chest one hundred times, and time eats the heart.
See other films from: 2010s | United States
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler
Of the 150 people featured in the clip—themselves from a community of about 3,000, 100 of which survived the Holocaust—the filmmakers could identify only 15.
I appreciate the writer's urge to document everything that will otherwise be lost to time—perhaps a useless pursuit in the long run, but so fulfilling in the moment. I want to remember EVERYTHING, every person I see, every conversation I have.
Love the shorter piece at the end. I don't like our culture of manufactured indifference. Try hard, try harder, care and love even harder still. :)