All That Glitters: City of Gold Revisited by John C

All That Glitters: City of Gold Revisited by John C. Tibbetts “I must therefore submit to this law: I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface.” —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida “We live amidst surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” History’s fingerprints are all over City of passing through divers hands, clattering Gold. through countless projectors in schools and The classic l957 documentary chronicles church basements, suffering the sea changes the roaring Stampede Days of the Klondike of video transfers and numerous language Gold Rush, the summer of l898 when more translations—it has lost its own specific than 40,000 fortune seekers from all over the identity and passed into the common world blew in to Dawson City, the capitol currency of folk art. It’s the history book of Yukon Territory. These hardy souls had with the cover page torn out—everybody survived the hike up the icy slopes of the knows it but no one remembers who wrote it. Chilkoot Pass, the 500-mile trip down river City of Gold was the direct result of a from Lake Bennett, and months of second Yukon discovery, a find almost as backbreaking toil in the gold fields of significant as the original l896 gold strike. In Bonanza Creek. Even though few had found l949, while exploring the interior of a their El Dorado, all of them—for reasons of Dawson sod-roof house under demolition, a their own—gathered in Dawson to celebrate local jeweller named George Murdoch found throughout the endless daylight hours. a collection of several hundred 8xl0 glass- In the almost forty years since its release plate negatives documenting Dawson’s Gold by the National Film Board of Canada, City Rush days. From them he made prints which of Gold has received more honors and been he sold to tourists. Six years later Colin seen by more people than any other short Low, a young filmmaker in charge of the documentary film ever made. [1] Its Animation Department of the National Film pioneering use of still photographs became Board of Canada, saw them in the Canadian the model for NBC’s “Project Twenty” National Archives in Ottawa. Excited by television series in the early l960s and for their extraordinary visual quality, Low and countless later series for A&E, the his colleague, cinematographer Wolf Koenig, Discovery Channel, and other cable outlets. began pondering how they could use them in [2] Recently, Ken Burns, in an interview a documentary film about Dawson. with this author, confirmed that City of Gold Many of these images were the work of has been a seminal influence on his own one man, Eric Hegg, a Wisconsin work. [3] photographer who had followed the Yet, there’s something mysterious about sourdoughs up the Chilkoot Pass in ‘97. its very familiarity. Its marvelous still That Hegg’s precious glass plates survived photographs seem to have been shaped less at all is a miracle. In those days, after glass by the hands of individuals than by the negatives had served their purpose, it wasn’t anonymous agencies of time. As City of Gold uncommon for them to be sold to gardeners has gone out into the world—the prints to be used as window panes in greenhouses. 1 It was a death sentence. Sunlight, which once not—to the surprise of many viewers— had given birth to the images, gradually achieved by manual manipulations. Low burned them away with the passing of the decided at the outset that the hand-held years. (The Hegg Collection is currently camera could not rival the degree of precision housed at the University of Washington.) and control afforded by the animation stand. “Hegg must have been a special man,” These techniques—called “graphics” at the says Low. “He may not have been an artist, NFB—had been developed during Low’s but given the body of his work we saw, we work with Norman McLaren. “From the know that he was a professional and had very beginning, in l945, when I joined good equipment. He worked with the new McLaren, he was animating the camera dry-plate technology, which wasn’t as across still images, frame by frame—working clumsy as the old wet-plate process and out zooms, pans, accelerations, deceler- which was more portable and light sensitive. ations, curves, exponential movements, etc.” He was an entrepreneur and he sold the Low became head of the Animation pictures to the locals.” [4] Department in l950. He brought in a The idea of basing a motion picture mathematician, Brian Salt, and a young almost entirely on still photographs was a technical whiz named Roman Kroitor to novelty at the time. [5] The Film Board was refine the animation process. Kroitor had reluctant at first to pursue the project. already directed one of the Film Board’s “They asked us why we wanted to use old, most famous documentaries, Paul dead photographs like that. We had to prove Tomkowicz, Street Railway Switchman our vision to them. Wolf and I went to the (l953). It was Kroitor who assisted Low in Director of Production of the Film Board devising a mechanism by which camera and told him we wanted to go to Dawson movements could be mechanically calculated City to research the story and shoot some and plotted to simulate the inertia and live-action footage to use with the photos. It momentum of hand motions. was an inconceivable distance from Ottawa Although, ensemble fashion, everyone in those days—a couple of days by air—and worked on the production process and the expensive. When we arrived, in l954, we basic storyline, Low claims it was also found a rather active ghost town that had Kroitor who devised the idea of sequencing gone from 40,000 people in l898 to a rather the still photographs of Dawson’s past into sleepy place of about four or five hundred. a progression of “scenes,” beginning with the There were still some people there since the Chilkoot Pass and continuing through the Gold Rush, and they told us a lot of boat armada on Lake Laberge, the arrival at spectacular stories.” the goldfields, and finally the celebration in In order to insure the best picture Dawson City. Everyone had agreed, at the quality, Low and Koenig (who were given outset, that the Low/Koenig live-action co-directing credit on City of Gold) made footage would bracket the stills sequence. llxl4 blow-up diapositives (transparencies) After the entire project had been shot directly from the original glass negatives. and edited, Pierre Berton, a young Canadian The low-contrast images were like fine-grain broadcaster and editor of Maclean’s positives which had such unusual clarity Magazine, was called in to work with the that the filmmakers could isolate tiny Film Board’s Stanley Jackson, a veteran portions of the picture field without losing scriptwriter, to develop a spoken resolution. “They were incredibly detailed,” commentary. “After the boys shot some explains Low. “The more tests we shot, the footage in Dawson City,” says Berton, more things in the pictures we saw.” “they found I was from Dawson and, City of Gold’s celebrated camera indeed, was working on the story of the movements over the picture surfaces were Klondike [The Klondike Fever, l958] at the 2 time. I went down to Montreal one 2,000 miles north from civilization, the cry weekend and we discovered we all had a was ‘Gold!’” Suddenly the camera pans meeting of minds. Our attitude towards the vertically down a mountain range (a Klondike experience—that it was, in fact, photograph or a moving image?) and a quick the experience of life, man’s search for dissolve plants us firmly on the slopes of himself as much as man’s for gold—was held the Chilkoot Pass. by all of us. .” [6] Paradoxically, we feel a release. There is The evocative music score—still a classic life before death. The Past is Heaven after of its kind—was by composer Eldon all. Banjo music quickens and the camera Rathburn, one of three composers working spirals down to a dark line of figures etched full time at the Film Board. Rathburn had against the dazzling snows. “This scene, already worked with Low on Age of the above all others, remained in my father’s Beaver (l952) and Corral (l954). mind to his dying day,” says Berton. A Apparently no one at the NFB regarded single file of men extends upward in a steep City of Gold at first as anything more than a diagonal across the white frame. The modest endeavor, just a 23-minute movie photograph is as stark, razor-sharp, and that was one among five or six other projects abstract as a Franz Kline painting. going on simultaneously at the time. No one We don’t genuflect before these still got rich in the process, either. Everyone, images of the past, like Francois Truffaut except Berton, was working under contract honoring the chapel of photographs in The for the NFB, and he received only a flat Green Room. There is no reverence here. $300. Rather, like a claim jumper chasing a Even the film’s first American release paystreak, the camera violates their borders occurred under less than noteworthy and contests their ownership. “We never circumstances. l40 prints were released by showed the edges of the photographs,” Columbia on a bill with Brigitte Bardot’s recalls Tom Daly, who edited City of Gold, first film, And God Created Woman.

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