It's an art project first and foremost, that secondarily offers a sweeping history lesson (world-wide and specific to Dawson City). Feels like that is important to say up front,
The effort here to combine/edit and write alone is impressive, especially if you consider the dual constraints - a time limit of a modern film and and the shelf life of the found underground footage. That old footage with its pulsing black/white imagery, like some films by Guy Maddin, is strangely hypnagogic to me.
I also wondered if some of the older footage was digitally enhanced to make some of the burbling distortions almost an "actor" of sorts. Besides the clever synchronization of text and image, there were many times that the visual noise would highlight a character or display as some kind of foe not just attacking the actual physical film, but the characters on screen.
Decay is the villain, here and always.
Just an admirable act of art to watch overall, even if the film itself is not so compelling. Sure the story of the Dawson City could have been told in briefer fashion, or gussied up to be more of a mystery, and I guess the soundtrack was a problem for others, not for me at all.
I first saw Bill Morrison's work via the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where usually the shorter the film the better....the flash of invention often cannot sustain for too long, which again adds to the notable success of this full length effort.
The miracle of permafrost preservation, the coherent vision and a reminder of how film tricks time (still remarkable to me when I consider the whole Frames Per Second slight of mind that perceives any motion picture as fluid). Enjoy!