All language subtitles for Dawson City Frozen Time 2016 1080p

This is fascinating.

These are world series shots
from 1917-1919, look at that.

We'll get to the players and
everything else in a moment.

That's the reds and the white
sox, that's gotta be 1919.

Here's bill Morrison,
he's a documentarian.

He put all this together here.

What a fascinating job.

Bill, welcome,
how are you today?

Good. Good to be here, Chris.

Just finding this is amazing,
in Canada.

Just getting a hold of these
videos is fascinating, huh?

It was an incredible story.

I welcome
you to the palace grand theater

which belongs
to the people of Canada!

Well, I'm excited about this
because, you know, I'm 66

and so I know what the silent
films were all about.

And because we were at
the end of the line up here,

there was no place else
to send them.

So, they just got left here.

This today is the world premiere
showing of these special films.

And here we got it, right in
Dawson, in the palace grand.

I was going to
start with a day in late June of 1978.

And I, at that point,
had just become

the curator of collections

for parks Canada's operation

at klondike national historic
sites in Dawson city.

And one day, a staff
archaeologist from winnipeg

walked in and stopped me
in the hall and he said,

"I was just down
at diamond tooth gertie's

where they were tearing down the
old recreation facility behind.

And they're digging up stuff
there and, " he said,

"it might be worthwhile
to go and have a look."

So I went down to the site

and there had been some
disturbance on the surface.

There was all kinds
of strange debris lying about

including things
like chicken wire

and broken curling rocks
and bottles

and there were these
metal containers

that contained reels of film,

also reels of film that were
just lying randomly about,

and lengths of film
lying thither and yon.

And the first question
I asked myself

was is this the old
nitrate stock?

And there's a very simple test
for that.

You snip off a little bit
and you light it with a match

and you can tell the difference.

If it's the later variety
of safety film,

when you put a match to it
it just curls up,

but with the nitrate film

it flares up quite violently.

And it turned out to be
nitrate film

so I knew we were
working with film

that was older
rather than newer.

Talkies, or sound pictures,

generally have made
a marvelous stride

of progress in the world
of entertainment.

Dawson city sprang up overnight.

A rip-roaring shack town

where the only cheap thing
was human life.

Where a lucky man could pluck
a fortune out of the earth.

All that went with those days
is now only a memory.

But what days they were
while they lasted.

I didn't quite know what to do with it.

I examined a few of the reels
and you could take them up

and you could start
unspooling them like this

and if you held them
up to the light

you could see images.

And one I opened and unspooled

and when I looked at it,

it said the strange
case of Mary page

which was the name of the film.

And I was later to discover
that that film

showed in the theaters
in Dawson in 1917.

When I called Klaus Hendricks
at the national archives...

He was their conservator...

He suggested that I speak
to Sam kula.

And Sam was very gregarious,

even in our initial
conversation,

and he seemed quite interested

in what I was describing to him.

Well, that of course
piqued my curiosity to no end,

so ipursued the matter
with him over the telephone.

And he said, "yes, there is
a lot of film there.

There appears to be
box after box of film,

not just an odd reel.

And it's coming out of what
appears to have been

an old swimming hole
that existed in Dawson."

Well, I had difficulty
sort of processing this

because swimming pools
and Dawson city

and the far north
didn't actually jibe

with my limited understanding
of the Canadian north.

But it all came clear

because I decided
it was really interesting

and I would go up there and see.

We brought him into town.

I can't remember
if we even checked him

into the hotel first,

but we went to the site
and examined it,

and he dug around a little bit.

And...

I do recall him
saying that he thought

that there was
an opportunity here

to recover films that had been
lost to the film industry.

We discussed how we could
undertake this.

And he realized
that it would be difficult

to enter into a contract

with another government branch,
bureaucratically,

because it's very complicated.

So I suggested that the museum
might be interested

and that's when
I contacted Kathy Jones

who was the director
of the museum

and asked her
if she would come down

to look at the films with us.

And she came down,
brought her camera along

and took a few photos as we
rooted around in this debris

that was scattered around

and we discussed what
we could do with this film

and how we would salvage it.

Immediately after that,
I took him to our office

and we sat in my office.

He got on the phone,

he contacted one
of his minions in Ottawa

and he dictated
the terms of the contract

over the telephone.

And we seemed we had it

almost as fast as it could
possibly be delivered.

There was one building that
was called the root cellar

and even in the height of summer

it was ice inside,
so it was quite cold

and we knew that
cold temperatures

would be the ideal place

for storage
of these nitrate films.

So as they were uncovered, we
hauled them out to bear creek

and we stored them
inside the old root cellar.

And Kathy put an item
in the klondike korner

describing what she'd found.

What I put in there,
"does anybody

have any idea what these films

were doing in the ground
in the first place?"

And then we get this letter
from a former bank manager.

Well, cliff thomson said, "I
read with interest your query

in the klondike korner
about these recovered films.

I'd like you to know
that it's my fault."

He said a lot more than that,
but in essence he said,

"I was the bank manager
and in the good old days

the bank managers
used to be the agents

for the major film distributors.

So the films would come
to Dawson city

and for the most part
remained in Dawson city,"

and he said, "some we tossed
into the Yukon river

when space ran out

and then ultimately
we stored them

in the basement
of the carnegie library,"

which was a half a block down

from where this
daaa building stood.

There was a dawsonite,
his name was John gould,

and he was born
and raised in Dawson

and as a child or youngster,

he would go to
that old skating rink

for the hockey in the winter

and he said, come springtime
when the ground thawed...

The film would start
emerging from the ice,

and the kids would
light it with a match

and it would flare up.

So he knew it was in the ground,

and then when we had this
discovery, like all of us,

it was like,
"we got another thing

that's come out of the Dawson
permafrost."

And John said, "well,
what's all the hullabaloo about?

I knew it was in the ground."

We kind of looked at each other
and said, you know,

"what else is Dawson
going to uncover?"

We had a
common interest in the history.

Yeah,
just any time we got together,

we would spend hours
just talking about

this bit of history,
that bit of history.

And if Michael had
discovered something

that I thought
was interesting, I'd say,

"oh, we've got one
of those in the museum,"

or whatever it was.

And Michael and I got engaged

and the community thought
it was absolutely hilarious

because I went around town
saying,

"oh, I've gotta go do this,"

and I had an engagement ring
on my finger

and it was pretty obvious
about what had just happened.

So anyway, we had completed
the summer work.

The films had been gone through
and they'd been sorted

and we managed
to get all of the film

into these two crates
and pack them up.

And a moving company was in town

and they were doing a domestic
haul from Dawson to whitehorse

and they agreed to put
these two crates

in the back of the Van

after they loaded this
household of furniture.

And it got to whitehorse

and when I went into
the movers, they said,

"we know what that is, we've
heard all about it on the radio

and we're not
going to touch it."

I went to greyhound and I said,

"we've got a couple of crates"

and they...
"Oh we know what that is

and that's hazardous material.

No way we're going to touch it!"

And then I went to
Canadian pacific air lines

and same thing.

So now we had the film
in whitehorse

but we couldn't get it
any farther.

And so, how do we
deal with this?

And one of my colleagues at
parks, a man named Jim Reilly,

said, "oh, well, the military

handles dangerous stuff
like that all the time."

So we suggested this to Sam kula

and I'm not sure
who talked to who,

but in the process they
arranged for the armed forces

to bring a Hercules transport
into whitehorse

and they loaded these two
crates of nitrate film

on a plane with a battalion
or platoon of soldiers

and then they flew
from there to Ottawa.