Filmic Gold: The Elemental Aesthetics of the Klondike Gold Rush in Bill Morrison’s <i>Dawson City: Frozen Time</i> (2016)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This contribution examines the elemental aesthetics of Bill Morrison’s documentary film Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016). The film traces connections between the birth of Dawson City as a boomtown of the Klondike Gold Rush in Yukon Territory in 1896 and the birth of cinema and the rise of the Hollywood movie industry, linking actual resource extraction (gold mining) to its discursive framing and mythologization (in Hollywood movies). Throughout the film, Morrison incorporates extracts of silent-film reels that were recovered from the permafrost below Dawson City in 1978 and that thus bear distinct marks of water damage that shape the aesthetic of Dawson City: Frozen Time. Through its comprehensive engagement of elemental materialities, Morrison’s film narrates the Klondike Gold Rush as a particular moment in the history of (North American) resource extraction. It invites analysis through the lenses of material and elemental ecocriticism, lenses that allow for understanding this moment within the vast network of profound transformations of the earth that have become known as the Anthropocene. The filmic composition itself prompts the audience to pay close attention to different elements—gold, earth, water, fire—that are crucially involved in both the Klondike Gold Rush and the film’s own history. Via this elemental focus, Morrison also creates a tension between the film’s elicitation of vicarious grief for the loss of the landscape and its evocation of irrevocable transformation as an ongoing process of human and elemental agency.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".