‘Reassembly: The Films of Bill Morrison’
The Metrograph
Starting June 14

“Dawson City: Frozen Time” (2017) should, I guess, be shunted into the genre of “documentary.” The film chronicles the socioeconomic and cultural changes undergone by a Canadian township at the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries. Utilizing a range of archival photos, films, and newspaper clippings, director Bill Morrison reconstructs a far-reaching story of tenacity, ambition, heedlessness, and opportunism. 

The Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s — the sine qua non of Dawson City — attracted all sorts of adventurers, entrepreneurs, and thrill seekers. Among those who fates and fortunes are glanced upon during Mr. Morrison’s film are the founder of the New York Islanders and the man who reconstructed Madison Square Garden, Tex Rickard; novelist Jack London; theatrical impresarios Sid Grauman and Alex Pantages; and a grandfather to the 45th president of the United States, Frederick Trump.

So, yes, Mr. Morrison’s picture investigates and elaborates upon the historical record. Yet “Dawson City: Frozen Time” is more than reportage. It is a ghost story, a reckoning of spirits both real and imagined. The film is part of “Reassembly: The Films of Bill Morrison,” a showcase of movies mounted by the Metrograph that will play at both its Ludlow Street location and on the venue’s streaming platform. “Decasia” (2002) is also on the docket, as well as a program of shorter films. The filmmaker will be present at select screenings.

If Mr. Morrison can’t adequately be pegged as a documentarian, neither does the appellation “avant-gardist” fit the bill. Sure, his approach to film stands outside the guardrails of conventional cinema and has more in common with certain art historical currents — primarily assemblage and, in particular, the work of American artist Joseph Cornell. Like that eccentric loner from Utopia Parkway, Mr. Morrison invests fragments of Pop culture with a preternatural quiescence, a nostalgia for states of mind that one is hard-pressed to name.

At a lean 67 minutes, “Decasia” (2002) was Mr. Morrison’s first feature and the first picture produced during this century to be selected for the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. The latter distinction is a bit ironic: Mr. Morrison’s film is distinctly unmodern and, to an extent, anti-high-tech. Cobbling together degraded oddments of silent cinema, he created a reliquary for the 20th century predicated on 19th-century precedent. Not even the keening, industrial score by American composer Michael Gordon diminishes the project’s antiquarianism.

“Decasia” is a lush compendium of disassociated images bookended by documentary footage of a whirling dervish and unified by a rich array of textures resulting from the spoilage of celluloid. As an undergraduate at Cooper Union, Mr. Morrison studied painting and, from the evidence, he’s never lost his taste for the medium’s grit, grain and unpredictability. At given moments, Mr. Morrison’s picture recalls visions as romantic and otherworldly as those of Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Eric Holzman, and Laura Dodson. You don’t have to agree with the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris that “Decasia” is the greatest film in history to realize that it is something special.

Still, it is “Dawson City” that has a greater reach, if only because narrative flow suits a medium that unfurls over a distinct spate of time. Here Mr. Morrison acts as an archeologist, sorting through more than 500 reels of nitrate film that were discovered in a construction site in 1978. Buried underneath a sporting facility in 1929, the films were in piecemeal and often alarming condition. Yet Mr. Morrison culls from them a haunting sense of impermanence and, with that, as poetic and tender a cinematic endeavor as any moviegoer could wish for.