This is Film! #1 Found Footage

Each session will cover a different topic and feature an introductory lecture by Giovanna Fossati (Chief Curator at EYE and Professor of Film Heritage at the UvA), followed by an extended Q&A with an invited (inter)national expert on the theme and a film screening. The series” opening lecture will address various practices that make use of found footage film. Fossati will discuss the topic at length with her guest, filmmaker Bill Morrison, who makes exclusive use of archival material in his storytelling and film practice. His works include the short The Film of Her (1996), which uses archival film to tell the story of an ancient film collection, and the feature-length film Decasia (2002), which uses decaying archival film as a metaphor for mortality.

In this session, Morrison will address and present his latest found footage documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016), a film featuring archival footage from the infamous Dawson City collection. In 1978, in the midst of minor construction work in Dawson City, a rural town in the Yukon territory in Canada, some 533 previously “lost” and unknown nitrate films were found buried underneath an old swimming pool. Using restored material from the excavated films as well as stills and archival material from the period, Morrison paints the story of a Canadian gold rush town and the transformation of a First Nations hunting camp by piecing together the lifecycle of a film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery and salvation.