Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 17/5/2018)

In 1978, work began on a new recreation centre in Dawson City in Canada's Yukon Territory. While excavating what had once been an indoor swimming pool opposite Diamond Tooth Gertie's Gambling Hall, labourer-cum-Pentecostal minister Frank Barrett discovered a cache of 533 silent films that had been buried in the permafrost some six decades earlier. As the woman in period dress introducing a special showing of these treasures at the Palace Theatre reveals, Dawson City was so remote that, when it came to moviegoing, it was five years behind the rest of North America and became a graveyard for touring prints, as the distributors didn't want to waste good money in shipping them back to their warehouses.

As he was also a city alderman, Barrett was able to halt construction while the site was investigated and archivists Michael Gates and Kathy Jones came to investigate. Such was the closeness of their collaboration that the ended up married. But they also realised that Barrett had stumbled upon a hoard of features, documentaries and newsreels on highly flammable nitrate stock that could fill in some gaps in screen history. Using captions and clips from the 1937 MGM short, The Romance of Celluloid, Morrison explains how the first film stock derived from gun cotton and was so volatile that 75% of the silent pictures produced after Louis and Auguste Lumière patented their Cinematographe have perished. Moreover, many lives were lost in nitrate fires, such as the one on 4 May 1897 at the Bazar de la Charité in Paris, which claimed 126 victims, the majority of whom were women.

Long before the 1896 gold strike, the area around the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers had been a key seasonal hunting and fishing ground for the Hän-speaking peoples. Among those living in the Tr'ochëk was Chief Isaac, the leader of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, who is shown in an old monochrome photograph. American prospector George Carmack and his wife, Kate (from the Tagish First Nation), made the first gold discovery in Rabbit Creek, with her brother, Skookum Jim, and her nephew, Charley. Over footage from Pure Gold and Dross (1913) and Yukon Holiday (1950), we learn that he staked a claim in Bonanza Creek on 17 August 1896 and a richer vein was soon found in the nearby Eldorado Creek.

As we see a clip from Jeanie Macpherson and Lynn Reynolds The End of the Rainbow (1916). a caption informs us that Joseph Ladue claimed 160 acres as a townsite and began selling plots to prospectors. By the summer of 1897, 3500 people lived in Dawson City and the North West Mounted Police relocated the Hän to Moosehead, some five kilometres down river from the Tr'ochëk. Their lands were decimated as five tons of gold were unearthed in 1897, the year the first `stampeders' from Seattle and San Francisco arrived and cameramen recorded such films as Gold Rush Scenes in the Klondike, Horse Loading for Klondike and SS Williamette Leaving for the Klondike.

Among the 100,000 making the trip to Dawson City that year was the 21 year-old Jack London, who sailed from Skagway in July. He returned home within a year after contracting scurvy, but he had a fount of stories to tell Another was photographer Eric Hegg, who would make thousands of glass plate negatives of the Gold Rush, 200 of which were discovered being used as wall insulation in his Dawson City studio. Some of his stunning images are contrasted with Pack Trains on the Chilkoot Pass (1898), as we learn that stampeders were required by law to lug 2000lbs of supplies with them. One wonders if Charlie Chaplin had seen Hegg's pictures of long lines of trekkers, as such an image appears in The Gold Rush (1925), while Clarence Brown employed dramatic special effects to show the dangers of avalanches in The Trail of `98 (1928).

In all, 70,000 lost their lives or turned back in trying to get to the gold fields. Those who got through did so by boat, with some even finding gold en route. Over shots from Packers on the Trail and Miles Canyon Tramway (both 1901), Morrison reveals that hauliers charged exorbitant rates to carry boats and cargo around the rapids. In nearby Whitehorse, one Fred Trump opened the Arctic Hotel and Restaurant on Front Street, which served as a brothel for the prospectors. Seemingly some members of the 45th president's family saw nothing wrong with crossing a border and making hay as an economic migrant. 

The boom town, however, was Dawson City and the bustle of life depicted in William S. Hart's The Darkening Trail (1915) contrasts starkly with Hegg's images of horse and carts getting stuck in the mud of the main streets. But, while conditions were primitive, fortunes were made and the Canadian Bank of Commerce opened a branch in Dawson City in June 1898 with $1 million in bank notes. But, even though the rich claims had already gone, the population continued to swell to 40,000 and Ladue was able to sell riverside plots for $40,000 a pop. Among the residents was newsboy Sid Grauman, who would go on to control such landmark movie theatres as the Million Dollar, the Egyptian and Grauman's Chinese in Los Angeles, which remains famous for its hand and footprints of the stars.

Places of entertainment soon grew up in Dawson City, along with the cribs on Paradise Alley. Charlie Meadows built the Palace Grand on Front Street, while Charlie Kimball sold his gold mine and took $12,000 on the opening night of The Pavilion. Competition came from the Monte Carlo, a casino-cum-dance-hall that showed films of the Spanish-American War, including Wreck of the Vizcaya, on 18 and 19 November 1898. Over extracts from Gold Rush Scenes in Klondike (1899) and Thomas N. Heffron's Temperance Town (1916), we discover that Wilson Mizner and Tex Rickard staged boxing bouts, with the latter going on to establish the New York Rangers ice hockey team and rebuild Madison Square Garden.

The big game in town, however, was gambling, as suggested by the clips from Poker at Dawson City (1899), Until We Three Meet Again (1913), Edwin Middleton's Wildfire (1914), Webster Cullison's The Bludgeon (1915), Allan Dwan's The Half-Breed (1916), George Fitzmaurice's The Recoil (1917), Allen Holubar's A Soul for Sale (1918) and Joseph Franz's A Sagebrush Hamlet (1919). Money didn't always buy happiness, as Dolores Del Rio demonstrates clutching handfuls of colour-tinted gold in The Trail of `98. Moreover, as Lois Weber's The Mysterious Mrs Musslewhite (1918) shows, there were frequent fires, with the business district of Dawson City burning down in nine consecutive years. But properties were rebuilt, with `Klondike Kate' Rockwell becoming a celebrated dancer at the Palace Grand's successor, The Savoy. She formed a partnership with bartender Alexander Pantages (the nature of which is hinted at in a clip from Robert Z. Leonard's Princess Virtue, 1917) and built the Orpheum Theatre following the 1899 Savoy fire and started showing moving pictures. Pantages would go on to own one of the biggest cinema chains in the United States, with 70 luxurious venues nationwide.

But Dawson City's fever dream was about to end, as news of a strike in Nome, Alaska filtered through during the winter of 1899 and a quarter of the population upped sticks. Among them was Eric Hegg, who left his negatives to partner Ed Larss. The views shown here are stunning, as is Panoramic View of the White Pass Railroad (1901), which follows the route taken by the new line from Skagway. Badly corroded newsreel footage shows the new heavy equipment being used in the expanded mines, as do Washing Gold on 20 Above Hunker and Rocking Gold in the Klondike (both 1901). Over a million ounces were extracted during 1900 (which would be worth $1.5 billion today) and a new sobriety pervaded the city, as all gambling dens were closed on 16 March 1901 and the brothels were banished to Klondike City. An extensive rebuilding programme followed, with a courthouse and a library among the additions, along with the headquarters of the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association.

It was below the DAAA's natatorium that the cinematic gold mine was discovered in 1978. This indoor pool could be frozen in winter for ice hockey and curling, while the auditorium had room for a dance hall, a bowling alley, a billiard room, a gymnasium, a couple of handball courts and some steam baths. Colin Campbell's The New Woman and the Lion (1912) and Maurice Tourneur's The Rail Rider (1916) give an idea of the atmosphere in such a place, while posters inform us of the world middleweight boxing match between Jack O'Brien and Jack Sullivan at the DAAA on 4 July 1905. The following year, future stage and screen star Marjorie Rambeau performed in Merely Mary Ann with the Thorne-Southard Dramatic Company, only to be stranded in the city for 10 months. During her stay, she played alongside a young Roscoe `Fatty' Arbuckle.

Also in 1906, Daniel and Solomon Guggenheim came to Dawson City to buy a clutch of mines to form the Yukon Gold Company and the kind of wheeling and dealing they practiced is captured in Fred Keenan's The Silver Girl (1919). A Universal Screen Magazine clip exposes another shady habit of `salting' rock faces with gold dust to dupe the hopeful into staking claims. But the industry was taken over by dredgers after the Guggenheims brought in a floating platform in 1907 and individual enterprise was crushed by corporate might and machinery reduced the need for manpower (sound familiar?). As a consequence, the population dropped to 3000 in 1910, with Apple Jimmy Oglow running a fruit stall in what had been the Orpheum Theatre, while poet Robert Service took up a post with the Canadian Bank of Commerce in 1908 and wrote his novel, The Trail of `98, in a cabin on Eighth Avenue. Irishman William Desmond Taylor was also in town at this time, working as a timekeeper on a Yukon dredger. He left for Hollywood in 1912, where he directed 60 popular films before his mysterious death in 1922.

Two years before Taylor decamped, Ben Levy re-opened the Orpheum on 15 October and invested in a new projector to show longer feature films, including Frank Reicher's The Sea Waif, E. Mason Hopper's Gloriana, Tourneur's A Girl's Folly (all 1916), Lambert Hillyer's An Even Break and Edwin L. Hollywood and Charles Horan's Polly of the Circus (both 1917). Meanwhile, Walter Creamer replaced the DAAA gym with a movie theatre, where comic shorts like Giuseppe's Good Fortune  and dramas like DW Griffith's Brutality and Frank Powell's His Madonna (all 1912) still did brisk business. Patrons also got to see educational offerings like Birth of Flowers (1911), The Frog (1912) and Protecting San Francisco From Fire (1915), a range of newsreels and cine-magazines, and travelogues like Pasquali & Co., A Trip Through Palestine (both c.1907), Elephant Racing at Perak (1911) and A Winter's Visit to Central Park (1912), and such serials as Edward Jose's Pearl of the Army, Grace Cunard and Francis Ford's The Purple Mask (both 1912) and George Seitz's The Lightning Raider (1918).

Although a safety film had been introduced in 1910, the studios continued to use nitrate stock. On 16 August 1913, a box of 10 films burst into flames in the Family Theatre at the DAAA. In the same year in Toronto, Robert Flaherty accidentally torched the first 30,000 feet of Nanook of the North (1922) with a cigarette, while the Eclair studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey went up in flames on 19 March 1919, with the loss of films like Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset's Balaoo (1913), which was found in the Dawson City cache. As we see streaked footage of Thomas Alva Edison, a caption reveals that his film facility spontaneously exploded on 9 December 1914.

Pathé had launched its first newsreel in 1911. But, as clips from Barry O'Neil's The Unpardonable Sin, Jack Conway's The Social Buccaneer and Jack De Grasse's If My Country Should Call (all 1916) show, people still tended to get their news from the print media. The newsreels found at Dawson City provided full coverage, however, of the Ludlow Massacre of 20 April 1914, when the Colorado National Guard fired on striking miners at John D. Rockefeller, Jr's Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. After 12 people were killed, the miners exacted revenge by attacking the mines and the Industrial Workers of the World gathered outside Rockefeller's New York office on May Day to hear Alexander Berkman back the miners and their families. As a result of the clash, Congress introduced the Child Labour Laws the eight-hour day.

The stash also contains lots of Great War material, including footage of a trench-digging machine, dogs working on the frontline and women making grenades in a factory. Another valuable find shows the Silent Parade organised in New York on 28 July 1917 by WEB Du Bois in protest at mounting violence against African-Americans. Courtroom scenes from films like Otis Thayer's Circumstantial Evidence (1912) follow, as Morrison describes how Judge Keneshaw Mountain Landis found 120 Socialists guilty of draft dodging in 1917 and deported 37 while jailing the rest for 12 months. The following year, as the papers lauded the victory of democracy over autocracy, he sentenced 113 union leaders from the Industrial Workers of the World. In April, anarchists sent 36 letter bombs to high-profile figures, including Rockefeller and Landis. As a result, on 21 December, Berkman and partner Emma Goldman were deported aboard the `Soviet ark', along with 247 other political radicals.

Once again, one suspects incidents from a century ago are being used to shine a light on events in our own time. But, while the accompanying images are from the Dawson archive, such point scoring feels a little heavy handed and it comes as something of a relief when Morrison moves on to the baseball footage found in the newsreels. In 1917, the Chicago White Sox had beaten the New York Giants to win the World Series. However, when star left fielder `Shoeless' Joe Jackson joined the US Army, the Sox slipped to sixth in the rankings. But, while the victorious squad was re-assembled for the 1919 season, rumours began to spread that gamblers had nobbled some of the poorly paid players and journalist Hugh Fullerton from the Chicago Herald-Examiner sought to confirm his suspicions after a failed double play in Game One by sitting next to former Cincinnati Reds manager Christy Mathewson and circling names on his scorecard. His articles on the rigged game led to eight White Sox players being indicted, including Eddie Cicotte, Swede Risberg and Chick Gandil, and Cicotte and Jackson admitted taking bribes from New York gamblers to throw the match.

As a result of the Black Sox episode, club owners appointed a commissioner to oversee the sport on 12 November 1920. Their choice was none other than Judge Keneshaw Mountain Landis, who banned all eight players for life. He also prevented the formation of a players' union and ensured that baseball remained segregated until his death in 1944. Shortly before his unveiling, 38 people died in a bomb attack on the Wall Street offices of JP Morgan on 16 September 1920 and newsreel footage found at Dawson City shows the hats and shoes of the victims lying on the sidewalk. We also see a report on the fire at the Solax Film Laboratories in Fort Lee on 20 December 1919, which destroyed many of the films made by pioneering woman director Alice Guy-Blaché. Among them was The Pit and the Pendulum (1913), which was preserved in the DAAa pool. But, having seen her life's work go up in smoke, Guy-Blaché retired the following year having made over 1000 films between 1896-1920.

Such was the delay in getting films to Dawson City that audiences had to wait several years to see such silents as Van Dyke Brooke's Mrs Carter's Necklace (1912), Travers Vale's The Lure of Woman, Joseph A. Golden's The Price (both 1915), Lloyd B. Carleton and Clarke Irvine's Barriers of Society, Maurice Tourneur's The Closed Road, Barry O'Neil's The Unpardonable Sin and The Hidden Scar, Raymond B. West's The Female of the Species (all 1916) and Chicken Casey, Lambert Hillyer's An Even Break, Harley Knoles's The Stolen Paradise, Jack Conway's The Little Orphan, Van Dyke Brooke's It Happened to Adele (all 1917), Ida May Park's Bread, Stuart Paton's The Marriage Lie, Travers Vale's Stolen Hours (all 1918) and Tod Browning's The Exquisite Thief (1919).

By the time of the Carnegie Library fire on 15 December 1920, Dawson City was levelling out at a population of 1000. In 1921, projectionist Fred Elliott took over the DAAA cinema and dedicated a showcase to actress Alla Nazimova on 4 August. Following the screening, he deposited the films with the bank, which stored them in the basement of the empty library. Among them were several films featuring scenes involving people listening at and bursting through doors: Otis Turner's Draga, the Gypsy (1913), the unattributed White Dove's Sacrifice (1914), Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley's The Scandal Mongers (1915), Fred Paul's The Vicar of Wakefield (1916), George Archainbaud's The Awakening and George Fitzmaurice's The Hunting of the Hawk (both 1917).

Also included in this montage is Ulysses Davis's The Kiss (1914), which starred William Desmond Taylor, who was murdered in his Los Angeles home on 1 February 1922. Unsolved to this day (after the studios protected several suspects), the case involved such celebrities as Mary Miles Minter, whose performance in Thomas N. Heffron's The Little Clown (1921) was found in Dawson. Also in the cache was J. Charles Haydon's serial, The Strange Case of Mary Page (1916), which centred on an actress caught up in a murder mystery. Five months after the director's death, Elliott showed The Soul of Youth (1920) at the DAAA. But this print doesn't appear to have survived, while we only have photographic evidence that Elliott screened Henry Kolker's The Palace of Darkened Windows (1920).

By 1927, Yukon Consolidate Gold Company had taken over mining operations in Dawson City. But two old lags from the bad old days found their paths crossing in Hollywood on 7 May 1928, when the adaptation of Robert Service's The Trail of `98 premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Indeed, as the Klondike Gold Rush was mythologised on page and screen, Dawson City became a tourist destination. Chief Isaac and Apple Jimmy Oglow crop up in newsreel footage as symbols of the past.

But things were changing around them, with Canadian Bank of Commerce employee Clifford Thomson at the sharp end. As the treasurer of the Dawson Amateur Hockey League, he suggested filling in the pool to level off the ice rink and, as the library had no more room to store the discarded film reels, it was decided to bury them after the distributors declined Thomson's request to reclaim them. The task was entrusted to Dan Coates and clips of luggage lugging from Eugene Nowland's Threads of Fate, Arthur Donaldson's The Salamander (both 1916) and A Girl's Folly are used to illustrate his endeavours. Similarly, snippets of anguished faces and sleeping figures from, amongst others, Ulysses Davis's The Iron Hand, Jack Conway's Her Soul's Inspiration (both 1916) and Louis Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie's The Seven Pearls (1917) show how any sense of regret at the burial of these unwanted movies passed with time.

A caption informs us that Chief Isaac died at the estimated age of 85 on 9 April 1932, shortly after Orpheum proprietor Len Wickman introduced `talkies' to Dawson City on 5 August 1931 - four years after Al Jolson had created a sensation in Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer. The film was Benjamin Stoloff's Speakeasy (1929). We see New York mayor Jimmy Walker extolling the virtues of sound in a 1929 edition of Fox Movietone News. But they were a disaster for Fred Elliott, whose DAAA audiences plummeted and he decided to dump several tons of silent movies into the Yukon River. A scene from the 1912 short, Out of the Deep, is used to show trunks being deposited in the water, while a caption reveals that Elliott tossed 400 more films on to a waterfront bonfire in September 1932. The following year, Elliott sold the Family Theatre to Eric Troberg, who also bought the Orpheum's sound projector and became Dawson's sole movie tycoon.

In 1934, the Carnegie Library was remodelled as Freemasons' Hall, with the last remaining films being destroyed in the process. One of Harry Lewis's home movies provides an aerial view of Dawson City in colour in 1936. But George Black caught the blaze that razed the Family Theatre on 30 December 1937, with a stash of nitrate films helping intensify the fire. The ice rink was rebuilt through public subscription, but the cinema was never replaced. The following year, the Dawson Daily News ran an article warning children not to take the film reels that had been found during the DAAA restoration. But, as Black's colour footage shows, further fires (possibly started by an arsonist) accounted for the Orpheum, Jimmy's Place and the Yukonia Hotel on 22 May 1940. Three weeks after the conflagration, Harry Gleaves began rebuilding the Orpheum and the new venue opened its doors just three months later.

Any hopes Dawson had of retaining its fading place in the world were dashed when the Alaska-Canada Highway was completed 300 miles to the south in 1942. As a consequence, Whitehorse became the new Yukon capital. Yet, life went on, with Ethel Anderson Becker publishing a collection of Eric Hegg's photographs in Klondike 98 in 1949. The travelogue Yukon Holiday appeared the following year, as Dawson's population dipped under 900. Those who stayed put on an annual pageant and we see Black's colour record of the 1954 parade.

Among those present were Irene Caley and Will Crayford, who had married seven years earlier and moved their cabin from Dawson to nearby Rock Creek. During the move, they found the Hegg negatives that had been hidden in the walls in 1900 and Irene asked boss Dick Diment at Dawson Artscrafts how to remove the emulsion so they could use plates for a greenhouse. Fortunately, he recognised their value and swapped them for the glass the Crayfords needed before donating the 93 glass and 96 nitrate negatives to the National Museum of Man in Ottawa. Director Colin Low was so impressed by Hegg's images that he teamed with Wolf Koenig to make the landmark 1957 short, City of Gold, which was narrated by Pierre Berton. Proving a huge influence on documentarists like Ken Burns, this was the first film to pan and zoom across photographic stills and not only won the prize for Best Short Documentary award at Cannes, but was also nominated for Best Live-Action Short at the 30th Academy Awards, which were held in the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, which had been built by Dawson alumnus Alexander Pantages.

By this time, only one cinema remained standing in the city. But, the venue variously known as The Opera House, The Palace Grand, The Savoy, The Auditorium and The Nugget, stood empty until Parks Canada tore it down in 1961. The following year, however, the structure was replaced with The Palace Grand, which still looks magnificent half a century later. In 1960, Pathé recorded a pageant recalling the olden days in Dawson City: Gold Rush Memories. But mining came to an end when Yukon Consolidated closed the last dredge on 15 November 1966. An aerial shot shows the scars on the landscape, while a caption describes how the National Film Board of Canada lost its entire nitrate collection when fire ripped through its warehouse in Beaconsfield, Quebec on 23 July 1967.

Around this time, the Arctic Brotherhood Hall that had been part of the DAAA's Queen Street façade was renamed Centennial Hall. Four years later, it was converted into Diamond Tooth Gertie's Gambling Hall and it was during extension work that the Dawson City silent film trove was found. Michael Gates contacted Sam Kula at the National Archives, who recognised their value instantly and had them stored in a cabin in Bear Creek, while Kathy Jones set about discovering how their history. She received a letter from Clifford Thomson explaining his decision to bury them and, over a scene from Barry O'Neil's The Girl of the Northern Woods (1910), she describes how her collaboration with Gates led to a marriage proposal.

A removal company agreed to take the crates to Whitehorse, but no one else would touch the nitrate stock. So, Kula contacted the Air Force and, on 11 November 1978, 506 reels were flown to Ottawa aboard a Hercules C-30. Between them, the National Archives of Canada and the Library of Congress managed to restore 533 of the Dawson reels, which contained the last-known fragments of 372 films. Nearly all had been water damaged, which accounts for the white splotches on the likes of The Butler and the Maid, The Martyrs, Harold M. Shaw's A Christmas Accident (all 1912), Travers Vale's Day Break and Dell Henderson's What Is the Use of Repining? (both 1913). But the permafrost had spared them the ravages of decomposition and their survival should send a warning to those swept along by the immediacy and transience of our disposable culture.

As one Dawson relict from 1918 neatly puts it, One Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, and true cineastes will delight in this glorious trip down memory lane. A little of Alex Somers's might go a long way, but it recedes into the background as the magical montages seize the imagination and leave one longing to know much of each featured film has survived. Given that the newspapers of the time appear to have survived, it should also be possible to discover which films failed to find sanctuary below the DAAA ice rink. But such research would probably be too sobering to undertake, unlike the sterling work that Hiu M. Chan did in compiling 100 Years at The Phoenix: Archive of an Oxford Cinema 1913-2013.

The odd slip appears in the closing credits, with Day Break being directed by Travers Vale rather than Maie B. Havey (who wrote the scenario) and there being no `w' in the surname of Rotherham-born film-maker, Harley Knoles. But, otherwise, this is a mesmerising triumph of the editor's art, as Morrison makes astute connections between the found films and certain Dawson City characters. As in his earlier works, he makes an avant-garde virtue of the ghostly effect that some archivists refer to as the `Dawson flutter'. But, while marvelling at the mystery of the medium and how future generations will gauge post-millennial life when there will be so little tangible, non-digital evidence to go on, it's difficult not to mourn all those lost faces, who were denied their shot at immortality by those mindless studio executives whose lack of forethought meant that they prioritised the bottom line over cultural legacy.