WINNIPEG, MB. – On February 3, Knox United Church will be home to the world premiere of the live score to noted independent filmmaker Bill Morrison’s latest film, Dawson City: Frozen Time. The film’s score, composed by and performed with Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers will be brought to life with eight singers, eight strings, percussion, and laptop. The performance will also mark Alexander Mickelthwate’s last appearance at the Winnipeg New Music Festival (WNMF) as Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s (WSO) Music Director and festival Artistic Director .
The film, a meditation on cinema’s past from the Decasia director, pieces together the bizarre true history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Located just south of the Arctic Circle, Dawson City was settled in 1896 and became the center of the Canadian Gold Rush that brought 100,000 prospectors to the area. It was also the final stop for a distribution chain that sent prints and newsreels to the Yukon. The films were seldom, if ever, returned.
The now-famous, once-lost Dawson City Collection was uncovered in 1978 when a bulldozer working its way through a parking lot dug up a horde of film cans. Morrison draws on these permafrost-protected, rare silent films and newsreels, pairing them with archival footage, interviews, historical photographs, and an enigmatic score by Sigur Rós collaborator and composer Alex Somers. Called “wondrous almost indescribable… a complete astonishment from beginning to end” by Los Angeles Times, Dawson City: Frozen Time depicts the unique history of this Canadian Gold Rush town by chronicling the life cycle of a singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and salvation.
“Dawson City: Frozen Time is the most beautifully decayed sublime story of images themselves, a movie that movingly described the arc and tragedy of our own history as a people, of what is valued and what is thrown out,” says New Music Festival Curator, Matthew Patton. “The score by Somers that accompanies the movie is one of the most emotionally moving I have heard.”
Somers gained notoriety through his work with Icelandic experimental post-rock band Sigur Rós and partner Jónsi’s critically-acclaimed self-titled solo project. The composer, producer, and visual artist has worked as co-producer, mixer, and engineer on several Sigur Rós releases including Valtari, Kveikur, and Brennisteinn. In addition to being the world premiere of the live score, this is also Somers’ first performance in Winnipeg.
Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra
Photo mhs.mb.ca