City of Gold
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | City of Gold |
| Country of production | Canada |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1957 |
| length | 22 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Wolf Koenig Colin Low |
| script |
Roman Kroitor Pierre Berton |
| production | Tom Daly |
| music | Eldon Rathburn |
| camera | Wolf Koenig Colin Low Douglas Roberts |
| cut | Tom Daly |
City of Gold is a Canadian short documentary film directed by Wolf Koenig and Colin Low in 1957.
action
Pierre Berton tells about the city of Dawson City , where he was born and grew up. At that time the city was a small town with barely 400 inhabitants. As a child he loved to play in the abandoned houses that looked like huge dollhouses. The wrecks of locomotives and ships also served him as a playground and did not allow him to question where all these things came from. Only the ancients of the place have a clue of what Dawson City was like during the Klondike gold rush of 1897/98.
In 1897, the gold rush began after a nugget was found in Dawson City. People from all over the world flocked to the small town, which eventually held 30,000 to 40,000 people. Prostitution flourished, but there were no incidents. The local police prevented any major thefts and crimes. Although only a handful of gold miners actually found what they were looking for and left the place as rich men - although some returned later impoverished - despite the great hardship, many men seemed to have found something that compensated them and made them stay there forever. The highlight of the gold rush was July 4th, 1898, on which those present celebrated Dominion Day and the Day of Independence at the same time , as the US town was on Canadian soil.
In the end, Berton returns to the present. His father would have liked to die in Dawson City but decided to move. Berton himself has not seen the city since he was a child, but thinks that it is just as dreamy as it was then and that the old people who stayed there have found their own Eldorado in the city of the gold rush.
production
City of Gold was produced by the National Film Board of Canada . The black-and-white film mixes real photos of the city from the 1950s (photos by Wolf Koenig and Colin Low) with archive photos that "come to life" through zooms and pans. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns called the film an inspiration for his own way of working, which makes extensive use of this effect (see Ken Burns Effect ). The film was shown at the Cannes International Film Festival in May 1957 .
Awards
City of Gold ran in Cannes in 1957 in the competition for the Palme d'Or (short prize) and received the short film prize for best documentary. The film received an Oscar nomination for Best Short Film in 1958 and was nominated for a British Academy Film Award for Best Documentary . In 1958 he won a Canadian Film Award for Film of the Year and was awarded a Golden Mikeldi at the Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Films .
Web links
- City of Gold in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- City of Gold at the National Film Board of Canada
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mikel Vause: Capturing the American Experience: A Conversation with Ken Burns weberstudies.weber.edu, Fall 2006.
- ↑ See the winners of the festival on festival-cannes.fr ( Memento of the original from December 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
