The Dawson Film Find (DFF) was the accidental discovery in 1978 of 372 film titles preserved in 533 reels of silent-era nitrate films in the Klondike Gold Rush town of Dawson City, Yukon, Canada.^[1] The reels had been buried under an abandoned hockey rink in 1929 and included lost films of feature movies and newsreels. A construction excavation inadvertently uncovered the forgotten cache of discarded films, which were unintentionally preserved by the permafrost.

The 2016 documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time details the history and recovery of the films, and features footage restored from the reels.^[2] The DFF is also featured in the 2013 documentary short Lost Forever: The Art of Film Preservation.^[3]

Description

The 533 film reels date "between 1903 and 1929 and were uncovered in the rubble beneath [an] old hockey rink".^[4] Films starring Pearl White, Helen Holmes, Grace Cunard, Lois Weber, Fatty Arbuckle, Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, and Lon Chaney, among others, were among the find. Along with the lost feature films, there was also rare footage of historic events, including the 1919 World Series.^[5]

History

Beginning in 1903, the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association (DAAA) began showing films in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada. The unreturned films were deposited in the local Canadian Bank of Commerce and later stored in the local Carnegie Library basement. The DAAA later converted a swimming pool to an ice rink, but because of improper conversion the ice rink suffered from uneven temperatures in the middle of the rink. In 1929, Clifford Thomson, then employed by the Canadian Bank of Commerce and also treasurer of the hockey association, solved the problem of the library's stock of film and the inadequate ice rink. Thomson took 500,000 feet of film and stacked the reels in the pool, covered the reels with boards and leveled the rink with a layer of earth. The DAAA continued to receive new nitrate films which would later fuel the destruction of the entire complex in a fire in 1951. The films stored under the ice rink were preserved by permafrost and were later uncovered in 1978 when a new recreation center was being built.^[6]

The Dawson Film Find material was collected and preserved, with these prints becoming the last surviving records of some movie studios.^[7] Owing to its dangerous chemical volatility,^[8] the historical find was moved by military transport to Library and Archives Canada and the U.S. Library of Congress for both transfer to safety film and storage.

Films found

Not all films are complete, as some were too damaged to restore in their entirety.