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It's nominally a documentary—it _is_ a documentary—but describing it as a documentary is something like describing Ulysses as a travel guide to Dublin. The film is transfixing, an utterly singular compound of the bizarre, the richly informative, the thrilling, the horrifying, the goofy, the tragic, and the flat-out gorgeous.

It's about growth, loss, recovery, and destruction in several areas, all circling around Dawson City as their hub . . . Morrison, however, weaves information about a variety of other subjects together in a way that makes the passage of time palpable for us. We see its effects on people and places and discover the odd, fortuitous connections among them in a dizzying fashion. A complex film like this deserves an extended commentary, which I offer below.

With its haunting score composed by Alex Somers, Dawson City: Frozen Time works like a fever dream – an assemblage of collective memories, of faces and places we didn't know we shared. In the end, this is the timeless gift that cinema grants to all its faces – each frozen in time, each always within the scope of our gaze, from either inside the world that flickers on the screen at a film festival like MIFF, or far beyond.

A deliciously complex film—masterfully weaving archival footage into a new narrative to bring a tremendous story to light.

Each digression seems gratuitous and shapeless at first, but emerges as part of a grander design.

Morrison offers a fiercely precise and discerning look at movies themselves as embodiments of history. In the process, he retunes our relationship with the ubiquitous cinematic archive—with the fresh batch of images that get delivered through the electronic pipeline by the minute—and with the very question of what's contained, or what's hidden, in the seemingly smooth and seamless flow of a movie.

The best new movie in town and the best movie of the year thus far. Though its title would suggest a focus on the mysterious fate of a little-known city, Morrison's latest output actually functions on several planes and tells many stories.

Best known for his 2002 compilation of decayed and corrupted celluloid, Decasia, Morrison is a far better archaeologist and archivist than he is a filmmaker... Though he aims to sculpt from them a moving narrative evoking the epochal cultural, social, and economic forces that swirled around the development of early cinema, Morrison instead presents his material through a series of ponderous cinematic devices, rendering history an inert mass.

Dawson City: Frozen Time" is a rather clunky and uninspiring title for a film that's both revelatory and deeply fascinating. A more evocatively poetic title, say "Gold and Silver," might suggest the extraordinary double helix of North American history and movie lore that Bill Morrison's found-footage documentary contains.

The variety of action and modes seen in the newly discovered films, dramas with titles like "The Unpardonable Sin" and "A Stolen Paradise," suggest a vast unknown film history. They also remind any film scholar that no matter how seemingly voluminous your knowledge of movie history, it is likely to be only a fraction of a fraction of the entirety. In any event, "Dawson City" now enters that time line as an instantaneously recognizable masterpiece.

It's an orgy for film geeks and history jonesers, to be sure, and the revelation of how exactly the prints got waylaid and then buried in the permafrost, saved by virtue of Dawson City's fading away in the twentieth century, proves a sweet narrative reward. There's no doubt that, after two full hours of this immersion, you feel like you've been somewhere — if not the Yukon, then a deep past we all thought was gone.

Anyone who has tried writing about history can tell you that the hardest part is knowing where to stop. This is the problem with Bill Morrison's intelligent but at times exhausting avant-garde documentary; at two hours, it's just too long and deliberate for its own good. There comes a point when even the attention span of the niche audience that exists for a narration-less documentary about silent film begins to lag behind Morrison's own interest in archival and historical minutiae.