The Permafrost Films: The Dawson City Film Find

On May 22, 1978, a bulldozer operator working on the excavation for a new recreation centre in Dawson City hit something unexpected in the permafrost beneath the site of an old utility building near the Carnegie library. The excavator stopped. The workers looked at what the blade had uncovered: a dense cache of film reels, hundreds of them, compressed into the frozen ground like layers of sediment. The reels were nitrate film — the highly flammable, now-obsolete film stock that was standard for cinema through most of the silent era. They had been in the permafrost since approximately 1929, when the Dawson City Amateur Athletic Association, which had been using the utility building as a storage facility, had buried them rather than pay the cost of shipping them south. The films had originally come to Dawson City as part of the rental circuit that sent films to remote communities; they were supposed to have been returned after screening, but some of them had been held back, accumulated, and eventually buried. What no one had calculated was that the permafrost would preserve them. Nitrate film is one of the most chemically unstable materials ever used in large quantities: it decomposes, it shrinks, it becomes brittle, and in its worst condition it is dangerously flammable. In warm storage, nitrate film from the 1910s and 1920s is typically in very poor condition or has completely deteriorated. In the permafrost of Dawson City, held at consistently low temperatures for fifty years, much of the film had been frozen in a state that, while not perfect, was far better than anyone had any right to expect. ## What Was Found The cache contained 372 reels of nitrate film (some sources put the count slightly higher depending on how fragments are counted). Of these, an extraordinary number were in condition that made recovery possible. The films included features, shorts, newsreels, and home movies spanning the years from approximately 1915 to 1929. Among the features were a significant number of films that had been believed to be lost — works that existed nowhere in any archive, whose titles were known from contemporary reviews and advertising but whose actual content had not been seen for decades. The recovery of lost films is one of the most significant events that can happen in film preservation, comparable in some respects to the recovery of lost literary manuscripts or musical scores. Film is a fragile medium, and the early years of cinema — particularly the silent era — have been devastated by deterioration, fire, and the indifference of studios that did not understand or care about the historical value of the material they held. The Dawson City find was not the largest cache of lost films ever recovered. But it was among the most significant in terms of the cultural and historical value of what it contained. Several of the films found in Dawson City are now among the most historically important items in the collections of Library and Archives Canada and the Library of Congress. ## The Recovery Process The recovery of the films from the permafrost was delicate work. The frozen block of reels had to be excavated carefully, transported without damage, and then slowly brought to a temperature at which the films could be separated and assessed without the thermal shock that would cause further damage to the already fragile nitrate. The process required both the physical care of people who understood how to handle fragile historical materials and the technical knowledge of film conservators who understood what nitrate film in various states of preservation required. The recovery effort was assisted by the National Film, Television and Sound Archives of Canada (now Library and Archives Canada), which sent conservators north to assess the situation. The reels were eventually transported south for professional assessment and, where possible, duplication — the process of copying the fragile nitrate onto modern safety film to preserve the content even if the original cannot be maintained. The process took years. The assessment of each reel, the cleaning and preparation necessary for duplication, the actual duplication process, and the cataloguing of what had been found all required sustained professional effort over an extended period. ## The Films Today The surviving Dawson City films are held at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Many of them have been digitized, and some are available for viewing through the archives. The Library of Congress, which received a portion of the American-produced films from the cache, has made several of them available through its online resources. The documentary "Dawson City: Frozen Time," directed by Bill Morrison and released in 2016, uses the recovered footage and other archival materials to tell the story of the Dawson City Film Find within the broader history of Dawson City itself. The film is a remarkable achievement — a documentary that uses found footage to construct a meditation on time, preservation, and the relationship between a place and its visual record. It won numerous awards and introduced the Dawson City Film Find to a wide international audience. For film historians and scholars, the Dawson City cache is still being processed — new discoveries continue to emerge as the materials are more fully assessed, and the full significance of what was found is still being understood. The find has influenced archival practices for nitrate film, has informed conservation approaches, and has raised awareness of the importance of systematic preservation before materials are lost. ## The Permafrost as Accidental Archive The Dawson City Film Find is, in a profound sense, a story about permafrost. The same frozen ground that preserved the gold in the Klondike creeks for millions of years, that preserved the Pleistocene megafauna in their frozen state, that has frustrated and enabled mining operations since 1896 — this same frozen ground preserved five hundred reels of silent film for fifty years, returning them to a condition in which their content could be recovered. The permafrost does not know what it is preserving. It simply holds what it holds, at whatever temperature it maintains, for as long as conditions allow. What it preserved in Dawson City — gold, mammoths, films — is a consequence of what people and nature brought to that place and what happened there. The [Dawson City Travel Guide](/guide/dawson-city-travel-guide) covers the history of the film find and the connection to the current film festival in Dawson City. The [Klondike Gold Rush: A Complete History](/guide/klondike-gold-rush-history-guide) provides context for Dawson City's broader cultural history. The film find is one of the stranger chapters of Dawson City's story, and it is one of the most specifically connected to the physical character of the place — to the cold and the ice that define what the Yukon is and what it preserves.