CHAPTER 4

Career Crescendo

From Labyrinth to IMAX

The Expo 67 Labyrinth Project

Unit B was formally dissolved in 1964, but members of “the committee” continued to collaborate on film projects, more often than not with Eldon as the contracted composer. Labyrinth (1967) was created for Expo 67 (28 April–27 October 1967), Montreal’s celebration of the centennial of Canadian confederation, and arguably the most impactful World’s Fair since Paris hosted its Exposition Universelle in 1900. Janine Marchessault and others have written extensively about the Labyrinth project in the film studies literature and elsewhere,1 but the nature and impact of Rathburn’s score have been neglected to date.

Produced by Tom Daly and directed by Roman Kroitor, Colin Low, and Hugh O’Connor, Labyrinth is indisputably the crowning achievement of the Unit B team. Nearly five years in preparation, and at a total cost of $4.5 million (CAD), it attracted over 1.3 million visitors from around the world in 1967.² The NFB website describes the multi-chamber project succinctly:

Labyrinth is a film without commentary in which multiple images, sometimes complementary, sometimes contrasting, draw the viewer through the different stages of a labyrinth. The tone of the film moves from great joy to wrenching sorrow; from stark simplicity to ceremonial pomp. It is life as it is lived by the people of the world, each one, as the film suggests, in a personal labyrinth.³

Reflecting on the project, Rathburn wrote that “Labyrinth was more than a film … it was a blending of architecture, film and sound.”4 Indeed, the three-chamber five-storey Labyrinth building was in itself one of the many architectural wonders of Expo 67. Aspirationally, Labyrinth was conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a multi-dimensional synthesis of the arts and sensory experience. As Janine Marschessault and others have pointed out, the idea of “cinema as environment” was particularly important for the creative team.⁵

The NFB was commissioned by Expo to produce a cinematic experience that would illustrate the theme of “Man the Hero.” With this theme in mind, Kroitor, Low, and O’Connor turned for inspiration to the labyrinth of Greek mythology, an elaborate structure built by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete in order to contain the mythological man-eating Minotaur. In dialogue with the ideas of cultural and literary theorists of the Toronto School (Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, most notably), Kroitor, Low, and O’Connor developed the idea of designing a cinematic labyrinth of film footage shot around the globe. Their hero (“modern man”), entangled in the labyrinth, is ostensibly tasked with locating and slaying the fearsome Minotaur trapped in the structure’s centre. According to film critic Jeffrey Stanton, “the monster he has to face is himself – this inner struggle is the one which will enable man to triumph over his own hesitations.”⁶ Reviewers were generally effusive in their praise. Time magazine wrote that “Labyrinth is proof that cinema – the most typical of 20th century arts – has just begun to explore its boundaries and possibilities.”⁷ Ian Aiken has called it an “eccentric and decidedly ambitious technological experiment that attempts to transcend what is empirically documented with a philosophical investigation of cinematic representation.”⁸ Janine Marchessault writes that Labyrinth was a “dazzling display of the new flexibility of the screen and the new synaesthesia of the visual cultures of the world mediated through technology,”⁹ pointing out that in its conception the film sought to show how “film technology could create a new awareness and an expanded consciousness for the new age.”¹⁰ Others have been more circumspect. Jeffrey Stanton insists that “hardly anyone really understood what it was all about.”¹¹

From the moment his involvement was first proposed, Rathburn pursued the Labyrinth project with intense interest. He knew that he was going to be given an opportunity to experiment as never before, and that he would be fully engaged with the creative team during the earliest stages of production and planning. “Usually a composer is brought in on such a film during its final stage of completion and in such cases he sometimes feels like a necessary evil,” he wrote. With the Labyrinth project, however, he “was involved early in its planning and was there to witness its birth.”12 Summarizing Labyrinth’s themes from his standpoint as a composer, Eldon wrote about both the opportunities the project presented to him for musical experimentation, and the trials and tribulations he encountered along the way:

Very roughly speaking the idea of Labyrinth was to depict the outer and inner life of a person from cradle to the grave. The criss-crossing journey through life, from an infant in Montreal, to a Japanese three-year-old, to an Indian five-year-old, to North American adolescents, and so on to elderly Greek peasants, gave us a great opportunity to have fun with sound … Many experiments were tried and some happy surprises occurred. For example, a Japanese ballad was combined with a series of trumpet fanfares … On paper [that] did not make sense, but when played in the Great Hall [architectural chamber] in Labyrinth, it was very effective. Where else but at Labyrinth could I have heard a mass of strings chasing themselves in ever-changing directions, and church bells from Ortona playing with a vibraphonist, glockenspielist and celestist from Toronto … Of course, there were things that did not work … [it turns out that an electronically processed] Jew’s harp sounding four times slower and deeper than normal is not that interesting.¹³

The Labyrinth pavilion consisted of three primary chambers. In Chamber One, viewers looked down from balconies on two massive screens, one on the floor far beneath them and the other on a vertical screen at the end of the chamber.¹⁴ Labyrinth’s producers apparently could not resist the temptation to use the two screens to “show off,” a Time magazine reviewer opined. “A girl on the far screen throws a bit of bread away; it lands with a splash on the shimmering pond of the bottom screen.”¹⁵ Attendees commented on a feeling of vertigo that would often accompany the experience in Chamber One, especially in a scene where perceptual cues create the illusion that they are dangling precariously with a trapeze artist above a crowd.¹⁶ As the audience proceeds through Chamber Two (“The Maze”), they encounter a complex and bewildering series of mirrors and small light bulbs, “mirrored into infinity … an interlude which suggests as yet undiscovered resources in one’s inner life.”¹⁷ In the final room, Chamber Three, five screens are displayed in a cruciform arrangement, and the audience is confronted with an interplay of images that tell of “man’s necessary confrontation with the dark aspects of his own nature, and his consequent release into a world in which, even though he is called on to give up everything, he finally finds the peace and happiness he has spent his life seeking.”¹⁸

Figure 4.1 • Labyrinth, Chamber One. From a series of balconies, viewers watch two fifty-foot screens, one vertical, the other on the floor.

Heard through almost 900 loudspeakers arranged in a variety of spatial configurations,19 Rathburn’s score was intended to provide emotional impact, musical commentary, and a mood-enhancing backdrop for the images and themes presented in each chamber, a role rendered doubly important by the absence of narration in the film. In Labyrinth’s Chamber One, the hope and promise of life are played out, as well as “its first great disillusionments.”20 The mammoth lower screen shows a child being born in a hospital, accompanied by gentle music that Rathburn titles “Birth.”²¹ As the sequence continues, the forty-foot-high vertical screen shows the doctor holding the infant up to its mother.²² Soon the child is a reckless motorcycle-riding teenager who encounters a variety of challenges, including an accident. In Jeffrey Stanton’s interpretation, he ultimately discovers “that life has moments of victory as well as moments of defeat.”²³ Rathburn accompanies these scenes with jazzy Bernstein-esque music titled “Confident Youth,”²⁴ heavily laden with frantic drumming, vigorous guitar strumming, and a syncopated horn arrangement. In a busy sequence titled “City Faces” Rathburn’s music captures the contemporary urban hustle and bustle, with the electric guitar apparently signifying the bewildering pace and chaos of modernity (as it has elsewhere in Rathburn’s film music).²⁵ In an arresting moment when the viewer encounters the metaphorical Minotaur, his music breaks into ferocious drumming on toms, followed by dissonant rising and falling clusters in the brass. In this chamber, as in Chamber Three, Rathburn’s music is engaged judiciously, and many of the film’s most powerful images unfold in silence.

For Chamber Two (“the Maze”), Labyrinth’s “hall of mirrors” inner sanctum, Rathburn provided atmospheric electronic music titled “Out of the Labyrinth.”²⁶ Recurrent electronic sounds reminiscent of trickling or dripping water may have drawn inspiration from an early experiment in musique concrète titled Dripsody (1955), by the electronic music pioneer Hugh Le Caine (1914–1977), Rathburn’s friend and Canadian contemporary.

In Chamber Three, introductory scrolling text screens outline the abstract inner voyage the audience is undertaking. Rathburn provides these screens with gently atmospheric accompaniment of Japanese character, incorporating shakuhachi flute. He accompanies the initial multiscreen footage that follows with a piece titled “Into the Labyrinth,”²⁷ as puzzled-looking African tribesmen stare into the camera with curiosity and bewilderment. This is foreboding music, highly reminiscent in character, texture, and instrumentation of Rathburn’s score for Universe (in its sparse, gentle, and otherwordly use of the celeste in particular). In a contrastingly light-hearted moment during the cruciform multi-screen presentation, Rathburn’s contrapuntal “The Universe Spins on the Point of My Head” provides tightly choreographed accompaniment for the gesticulations of a seemingly well-rehearsed “traffic cop” at a busy urban intersection. This music continues as the film rapidly segues to footage of a circus clown on a tightrope, with sforzando guitar notes crisply plucking as he takes each precarious step on the wire. The sequence closes with frenetic music accompanying the clown as he spins china platters above his head. This music fades and we find ourselves cruising along the Moscva River. We soon bear witness to charming moments between teacher and student in a Russian ballet studio, all to the accompaniment of the studio’s diegetic piano music. In stark contrast, we soon segue to sombre music titled “Farewell to a Hero”28 – featuring Shostakovich-like dissonant voice leading and string sonorities – accompanying footage of the 1965 state funeral of Britain’s wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, to whom Eldon had paid tribute with a rousing patriotic song more than twenty-five years earlier: “Mr. Churchill, Our Hats Are Off to You!” (1941). The score ends with Canadian folksinger Russ Gurr’s “The Thresherman’s Ball” accompanying footage of a rural threshing festival. This is followed by images of a selection of the diverse cultures of the world accompanied by Rathburn’s gentle theme-and-variations treatment of Gurr’s tune.²⁹ Eldon had initially proposed more introspective and ponderous closing music for Labyrinth. Over his mild protest, however, the production team came to the conclusion that “more meaning could be obtained from the labyrinth if the music did not try to compete with the large scale of the theatre.”³⁰ He viewed scoring decisions of this kind as “a kind of counterpoint” or “playing against the film.”³¹ For the closing credits, Rathburn provides a thinly textured Chinese love song reminiscent in character of the Japanese music with which he had accompanied the opening title screens of Chamber Three.

Given the anticipated success of Labyrinth, the NFB simultaneously issued a two-sided LP of Eldon’s music to celebrate the Canadian Centennial.³² As one of the central attractions of Expo 67, “Labyrinth automatically reached a very large audience, and the soundtrack … went along for the ride,” Eldon explained. “The soundtrack has extended that audience.”³³ According to the LP’s liner notes, like the experimental film experience it accompanies (“as different from ordinary film as poetry is from prose”), the recording of Rathburn’s score provides a stereophonic musical experience unlike any other.³⁴ Time magazine described his music as “a sonic boon, admirably understating Labyrinth’s stunning visual display.”³⁵ An enthusiastic blogger describes how the LP presents the listener with a “unique phonographic experience … [in which] Rathburn’s vivid, evocative music recreates the many moods of the Labyrinth.”36 According to the well-known Canadian record reviewer Clyde Gilmour, Rathburn’s music for Labyrinth was “an aural experience [that] is something to remember with excitement and pleasure … the adjective ‘sensational’ is not excessive for describing the music’s qualities.”³⁷ The Labyrinth production team experienced not only an ecstatic feeling of accomplishment during the summer of 1967, but also profound sadness. On 20 September 1967, when Expo was in full bloom, Kroitor and Low’s co-director Hugh O’Connor was tragically murdered while shooting a documentary film on the cycles of poverty in the small Appalachian town of Jeremiah, Kentucky.³⁸

Travels with Margot

While fine-tuning his work on Labyrinth, Eldon wrote scores for a number of other NFB films during the years 1967–68, including Ron Kelly’s feature film Waiting for Caroline (1967, a CBC/NFB co-production), and the short films Charlie’s Day (1967) and Capital on the Ottawa (1968). In addition to Eldon’s music, and their being fine documentaries in themselves, Charlie’s Day and Capital on the Ottawa had something else in common. Film Board sound editor Marguerite Payette (1915–2012) was assigned to both projects. Eldon and “Margot” had known each other in passing since the late 1940s, and she had collaborated with Eldon on previous film projects, most notably on Drylanders (1963), a feature film about the cruel hardships faced by settlers attempting to farm the dry Canadian prairies during years of drought and economic depression. But it was not until 1968 that Eldon and Margot began to pay more attention to each other. According to one account, it was at the urging and cajoling of Eugene Kash, Eldon’s longtime friend and their mutual colleague at the NFB, that the couple began dating.³⁹ When they married on 7 April 1969 at Our Lady of Fatima Church in Montreal (Ville Saint-Laurent), two weeks prior to Eldon’s fifty-fourth birthday, Margot retired from the Film Board. In his characteristic unadorned and matter-of-fact way, Eldon records the event in his autobiographical notes: “In 1969 I married Marguerite Payette, who was the first woman sound editor at the National Film Board.”⁴⁰

Marguerite Payette was born on 13 November 1915 in Ottawa’s Lower-town district, to parents Georgiana Courville and Georges Payette.⁴¹ Raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic home, Margot was educated by the nuns of the Rideau Convent who presided over Ottawa’s Catholic education system, and at McGill University where she completed a BA in the 1930s, a rare accomplishment for a woman of her generation. During the war years Margot found employment at the NFB, where her job included working on newsreels that provided updates from the battlefields of Europe, films that would be distributed to cinemas across the county, with voice-over by the iconic Canadian actor and radio personality Lorne Greene, whom she came to know well.42 In time she apprenticed as a sound editor at the NFB, and became the first woman to serve in that capacity, working with equal fluency in both official languages. Marguerite Payette is credited in this role on sixty-four NFB film productions between 1957 and 1969.⁴³

From 1969 to Eldon’s death in 2008, Margot was his constant companion and life partner, taking care of their health, medical appointments, shopping, travel bookings and itineraries, bills, and financial management. Eldon was very much in need of Margot’s faithful dedication and support, as by all accounts the management of these and other daily affairs was not among his strengths. When asked later in life about whether he and Margot might have wanted to have children had they been married earlier, Eldon was reflective:

I married only quite late in life. People always ask me if I would have liked to have had a family. I might sound odd, but I don’t think so. Margot and I have talked about this. Would I have wanted a little Eldon Rathburn? In fact I’m very pleased that I didn’t get married early, since it might not have gone well. I was doing too many things during my twenties in Saint John, and things fell apart. I left the church, our radio program was cancelled, and I was out of a job.⁴⁴

Having had a lifelong aversion to flying, Eldon preferred to travel by train or ocean liner. However he had a wanderlust that undoubtedly took hold during his days of touring with Don Messer and the Lumberjacks in the 1930s – to Boston and throughout the Maritimes and Eastern Seaboard – and in his life-changing sojourn to Los Angeles in 1945. In December 1968, a few months prior to his wedding to Margot, Eldon travelled to Egypt to record his score for John Feeney’s Fountains of the Sun (1969) with the Cairo Symphony Orchestra.⁴⁵ Feeney had worked for the NFB from 1954 to 1963, during which period he collaborated with Eldon on Sky (1963, discussed in chapter 3) and the Oscar-nominated documentary Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak (1963). Given the success of these collaborations, Feeney immediately called upon Eldon to compose the score for Fountains of the Sun, a sweeping documentary that follows the Nile to its source by traversing 3,200 kilometres through the countries whose territories form the Nile basin, and documents the highly anticipated last flood of the Nile prior to the construction of the Aswan Dam. While in Egypt, Eldon also took in the sights and sounds of this ancient country and culture. One such off-site excursion is captured in an amusing photo of Rathburn astride a camel, near Cairo, in December 1968.

Figure 4.2 • Eldon Rathburn sightseeing near Cairo, Egypt, where he conducted the recording of his score for John Feeney’s Fountains of the Sun (NFB, 1969).

The pleasure of travelling together on countless voyages and cruises was among the many joys of Eldon’s marriage to Margot. Their notable voyages include vacation travel to the Grand Manan Islands (1970), Hawaii (1977), England (1982),46 Hong Kong (1988), Czechoslovakia (1997), and a “cruise around the world” (1994).⁴⁷ The couple also travelled frequently to Chicago, Boston, and New York, where Margot would often dutifully accompany Eldon as he attended boxing matches and baseball games, two of his passions. (According to family lore, Eldon’s interest in boxing was such that he once missed the second half of an important Carnegie Hall concert in order to get to the boxing match in time.)⁴⁸ The quality of their companionship, and their mutual pride and love for each other, shine through in the photo taken at a tribute concert hosted by the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival in honour of Eldon’s ninetieth birthday (figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3 • Eldon and Marguerite Rathburn, 31 July 2006, attending a tribute concert hosted by the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival in honour of Eldon’s ninetieth birthday. The Chamber Players of Canada released the CD Eldon Rathburn Works at the event (ATMA Classique CD 2371). Photo by Jana Chytilova.

Further Experimentation with Multimedia: Of Many People (1970) and It All Depends (1974)

Commissioned by the office of the Secretary of State and the Province of Manitoba, Of Many People (1970) was created to mark the province’s centenary celebrations. The film was conceived in two parts, an opening section based on Franco-Manitoban novelist Gabrielle Roy’s Where Nests the Water Hen (1950), and a closing section comprising an impressive multi-screen collage of still photos capturing scenes of Manitoba’s past and present. With a mere fraction of the budget of Labyrinth (1967), the film nonetheless aspired to adopt the Expo film’s general approach, presenting a novel admixture of still photos, film footage, animation, and drawings, and engaging an elaborate projection system involving a 16 mm film projector, six electronically synchronized 35 mm slide projectors, and three screens.49 The experience of scoring this film seems to have been an infelicitous one for Eldon. While delivery timelines are always prohibitively tight for film composers, this was not generally a source of concern for Rathburn. (In the words of NFB recording engineer Louis Hone: “he’s talented, he’s fast, and he could deliver the merchandise.”)⁵⁰ However Eldon was given little more than a week to complete his score for Of Many People, after receiving the complex edited film. To make matters worse, he had reason to believe that “Malca [Gillson, sound editor] wanted Harry Freedman to be given this score,” at least in part because Freedman was from Winnipeg.⁵¹ Finally, although Eldon felt that the score contains some of his best work,⁵² at least one critic disagreed. Frank Morriss of the Winnipeg Tribune was damning in his faint praise. Rather than enhancing the bewildering multi-screen panoply of images, in Morriss’s view Rathburn’s music only exacerbated the viewer’s disorientation with a hodgepodge of stylistic references. “Eldon Rathburn’s score is satisfactory, and pleasant enough to listen to,” Morriss wrote. “[But] I found it a bit fragmentary in styles, and would like him to have hit on one overall musical pattern to tie the thing together.”⁵³ Indeed this particular brand of postmodern musical discourse – juxtaposing diverse styles and blending genres (something Eldon liked to call “crossbreed music”)⁵⁴ – had become a trademark of Rathburn’s style, both in his film and concert music.

Beginning in about 1970, and undoubtedly with his impending retirement from the Film Board at the forefront of his mind, Rathburn began to stretch his wings beyond the framework of the NFB. Increasingly, he began to accept contracts from private-sector film producers, either on a secondment basis or simply with the blessing of the Film Board when he requested a leave of absence. It All Depends (1974), a multimedia film sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute’s world-renowned museum in Washington, DC, was one such example. Drawing inspiration from the Labyrinth project, and in a “bold and experimental departure from the museum’s traditional exhibit format,”55 the Smithsonian’s installation featured five chambers or “zones,” each highlighting an aspect of the natural world on which the future of humankind depends: Zone 1 – we depend “on the natural world”; Zone 2 – we depend “on checks and balances”; Zone 3 – we depend “on adaptation”; Zone 4 – we depend “on our use of the earth”; and Zone 5 – it all depends “on us,” with our unique power as a human species to think and problem-solve.⁵⁶ Karen Loveland and John Hiller – the Institute’s filmmakers with whom Eldon corresponded and collaborated – had gathered footage from over the United States, areas that had “not been soiled by the hand of mankind (such as Carmel, California)” as well as “clear cut slopes in the Oregon mountains,” “strip mined areas in West Virginia,” “pollution of the air and water,” “the good life in Las Vegas” and “urban congestion in New York.”⁵⁷ In all, the project required Rathburn to compose thirty minutes of music. Zone 1 alone consisted of three four-minute films: Sharing a Life Style (“showing how members of the same species both compete and cooperate to meet the essentials of life”), With a Little Help from Our Friends (a film highlighting “interspecies cooperation”), and The Predator and the Prey (an animated film showing that “one animal’s meat” can be seen as “another animal’s population control”).⁵⁸ In addition to travel, accommodation, and meal expenses, the Institute paid Rathburn a total fee of approximately $7,500, excellent remuneration for thirty minutes of film composition work in 1974 (approximately $37,000 in 2019 funds, correcting for inflation), and a great deal more than the proportion of his NFB salary that would have been allocated for equivalent work. An unfortunate consequence of the film’s multi-chamber multimedia design is that, as a one-off installation comparable to the Expo 67 Labyrinth project, it is not a work that can be readily uncrated for future presentation. Fortunately, however, a recording of Rathburn’s music has been preserved at Library and Archives Canada.⁵⁹

The following year Eldon was busy with a number of important NFB film projects, including Part I (My Name Is Susan Yee) and Part III (My Friends Call Me Tony) of Beverly Shaffer’s impactful Children of Canada series (1975), and Jeannette Lerman’s Enemy Aliens (1975), a film about the mistrust and injustice faced by Japanese Canadians as they struggled to be embraced by their new country. Prior to retiring from the Film Board in 1976, Rathburn’s last external secondment was an assignment to score Terence McCartney-Filgate’s CBC Television documentary film Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Road to Green Gables (1975).60 Eldon was particularly proud of his work on this film, a score he called his “big sweeping romantic piece.”⁶¹ Twenty years later, when Louis Hone asked him about the identity of the “real” Eldon Rathburn, he replied without hesitation: “You asked me who the real person is? I have a feeling that I’m a great big sentimental slob at heart! I try not to be, but I enjoy writing romantic music very much: [my score for] Road to Green Gables for example. You don’t often get that opportunity [as a film composer].”⁶²

Two weeks before joining an estimated half-billion people around the globe as they watched the opening ceremonies of the 1976 Summer Olympic Games at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, Eldon retired from the full-time job he had held for nearly thirty years at the Natonal Film Board of Canada. “Today is my last day at the NFB,” he wrote to Lou Applebaum on 30 June 1976, clearly in a pensive and reflective mood as he cleared out his office. “It seems ironic that my last job was to improvise a piano score (the return of silent movies)! I must say how thankful I feel toward you for giving me the opportunity to write for the NFB. Remember ‘To the Ladies’? It seems like yesterday.”⁶³ Nine months later, at a retirement party hosted by the Film Board in Rathburn’s honour, sound editor Don Wellington – whose 1948–74 career at the NFB spanned roughly the same three decades as Rathburn’s (1947–76) – evoked a round of laughter from the gathered crowd when he rose to pay tribute to his longtime friend and colleague:

Eldon was never a prima donna. He didn’t write scores only for the glamorous, promising films. Like all the rest of you filmmakers, he didn’t hesitate for a moment to roll up his sleeves and take on a nuts and bolts sponsored-film job. And to these he added particular lustre, he rescued them. In 1949, for instance, he wrote the score for Teeth Are to Keep, in which we revealed that the principal use of teeth is for the chewing of food [laughter]. And Eldon softened this blow with very sensitive brushing music [laughter], and very aggressive rinsing music and a tone poem to cavities and decay – a remarkable job that has to be seen … And of course the greatest work of all time in the sponsored field was 1956’s Fish Spoilage Control, and many of us thought that his bacteria fugue had true germs of greatness [laughter].64

Roman Kroitor, Colin Low, and others followed suit with rousing tributes of their own. Notwithstanding the accolades, all of the assembled NFB staff members knew that they had not heard the last from Eldon Rathburn.

Teaching Film Music Composition

When Eldon retired from the Film Board, he also retired from his role as a part-time instructor at the University of Ottawa, where he taught a course on film music composition from 1972 to 1976. Although a University of Ottawa teaching evaluation for Eldon suggests that he may not have been a natural-born pedagogue,⁶⁵ his lectures and composition workshops must have been fascinating and engaging for his composition students. They undoubtedly offered valuable insights into the working methods of the film composer, something few composers in Canada could have provided with Eldon’s passion and depth of experience. The following sample excerpts from Rathburn’s pedagogical notes merit citing in full, as they offer a rare glimpse into the collaborative routines and procedures of the film composer:

One must remember that the film makers have been working on the film for many weeks, and that they know it much better than the composer who has just come upon it. Some sound editors use stock music [sometimes called “Temp scores”] to aid them in cutting certain sequences. Listen to their selection but do not feel obliged to write like them. Find out which sequences are to be covered with sound effects and which are to be music sequences. And remember that this may change.

Each composer has his own method of work. I write very rough sketches with overall timing, not many details and very fast. This way of working makes my mind focus on the overall shape of the film. The next step is to do it again, refining the sketches and writing alternative ideas. Sometimes I have to write two sketches in order to prove to myself which one is better for the film. I study the film from a videotape made with footages printed on each frame. This is a much better way to work than using a Movieola. The next step is to arrange a meeting with the film makers and to play the sketches to them on a piano while viewing the film. I find the playing of sketches to be of very great value in order to get closer to the film and to make sure that we are all together in our concept. Playing sketches is not without its dangers and embarrassments. Many film makers cannot translate the sound of the piano to an orchestra. It is up to the composer to explain how he intends to orchestrate the sketches. Even then there will be disagreements. However it is better that they happen at this stage and not later at the recording session. The composer should be prepared to make changes in his sketches, and even to scrap the ones that will not work. There is nothing to be gained from being stubborn about changes, etc. One must watch however for well-meaning but often unintelligent suggestions from film makers. To me this is the most important aspect about writing film scores. Too often we hear about scores which were thrown out because the film composer and the film makers didn’t get together before the recording sessions. And some film makers use words which can be misleading to the composer. For example, the word pulse could be interpreted as the rhythmic beat and also as the movement in the inner parts. This misunderstanding has happened during my discussions. I once had to rewrite a section because of a misunderstanding of the word pulse. The direction [I received] about pulse led to my writing a rhythmic figure which sounded too militaristic, when what was meant was “inner movement” in the music. One sometimes gets directions such as “don’t use trumpets, I don’t like their sound,” or “have you ever heard Debussy’s Reverie?” One must be philosophical when these remarks are made. There is a delicate balance between being cooperative and being servile to a film maker who really does not know much about music. In spite of this I really believe that playing sketches is a real necessity when writing a film score. Don’t forget that the film makers know their film better than you do. It is up to you to help make it work. In a word, COOPERATION is needed.66

Who Has Seen the Wind (1977)

Allan King’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1977), set in Depression-era Saskatchewan and based on the classic 1947 Canadian prairie coming-of-age novel by W.O. Mitchell, was Rathburn’s first major film project following his retirement from the NFB. From his years with the Film Board, Eldon had become adept at composing and orchestrating in a style that depicts Canada’s rural culture and heritage, a gift that is on full display in this important score. Who Has Seen the Wind employs a rich emotional palette, encompassing joy, sorrow, reminiscence, brooding, excitement, nostalgia, religiosity, anger, playfulness, dignity, love, images of childhood, and the austere beauty of the “big sky” country of the Canadian prairies. Rathburn is equal to the task with a score ranging from sumptuous string writing, pastoral music, and memorable melodic leitmotifs, to quirky character music that captures a rollicking gopher chase. In his reply to a letter of 27 December 1983 from a young musician who had written to express admiration for the score, Eldon describes the ways in which he employed motivic content to signify some of the film’s moods and themes:

I made use of ragtime to depict the period of the film. A broad pastoral theme was used for the Main Title. A texture of glockenspiel, piano and guitar was used for certain thoughtful sequences. A dissonant two-note motive was used for Old Ben’s son to suggest his troubled mind. Old Ben had a jerky harmonica theme which I alternated with hymn tune fragments when he first calls on the minister. Old Gospel tunes with a mystic overlay of strings were used for the old religious fanatic. The two boys had their own theme, which was played on the oboe, harmonica, piano, etc., at different times. The Jews harp and banjo as well as the guitar were used to give a rural flavour to the music.67

With reference to this score, Eldon writes in his personal notebook about the “problems of choice” that the film composer confronts when scoring a particular film sequence:

For example, a barnyard chase could be interpreted as a joyous bluegrass number, an old time piano novelty piece, a hoedown, etc. I like to mix the elements, the result being a kind of “crossbred” music. I try to look for some opportunity to have some fun in my film scores. In Who Has Seen the Wind I was happy to be able to use such instruments as the banjo, Jew’s harp (my favourite) and the harmonica. The orchestra consisting of twenty-four of Toronto’s best was a joy to work with.68

The Jew’s harp is featured not only in Rathburn’s quirky and animated hoedown treatment of the barnyard chase scene, but also later in the film when the film’s lead character “Ben” (played by José Ferrer, the celebrated Puerto Rican American actor) is sentenced to serve prison time. Here Eldon intones slow and gloomy Jew’s harp tones over a melancholy orchestral backdrop.⁶⁹ Rathburn’s fondness for the Jew’s harp is explored more thoroughly in chapter 7.

According to one online reviewer, Who Has Seen the Wind “might be considered the archetype for the great Canadian movie.” “You don’t feel emotionally blackmailed … The film tugs at the heart without cheap tricks to gain your sympathy … [There is] no exaggerated Hollywood cruelty, only real-life mundane cruelty to animals and children. It depicts life just the way it really is.”⁷⁰ Who Has Seen the Wind was nominated for the Chicago International Film Festival’s Gold Hugo Award (best feature film), and it won both the Grand Prix at the Paris International Film Festival and Canada’s Golden Reel Award (as the highest-grossing Canadian film of the year).

The Defender (1989)

More than a decade after collaborating with Allan King on Who Has Seen the Wind, Eldon accepted Stephen Low’s invitation to score The Defender (1989), an NFB film widely considered a cult classic for the way in which it straddles the line between documentary and mockumentary (then a rare but emerging genre in cinema).⁷¹ The NFB lists The Defender on its “Outside the Box” channel under the heading “Experimental films, humorous films and films that make you go ‘Wha …?’”⁷² Vacillating between poignant moments and comic satire, it tells the story of an eccentric but determined Manitoban, Bob Diemert, whose dream is to design a revolutionary fighter plane that will catapult him to the forefront of the world of aeronautical engineering and bring Canada to a leading international role in aeronautic armament. Diemert’s reputation as a rebuilder of Second World War warplanes was launched when he restored a Hawker Hurricane and flew it in Guy Hamilton’s The Battle of Britain (1969),73 an action film best known for the quality and suspense of its flying sequences. Nearly twenty years later it was his restoration of a Japanese Zero for the Confederate Air Force of Texas that once again brought Diemert notoriety in the antique airplane world and helped him finance his dream of building a revolutionary new warplane that would cost the Canadian Air Force $25,000, and replace the CAF’s fleet of F-18 fighter jets, each of which came with a $30 million price tag. Low had read a Globe and Mail article about Diemert’s project in the early 1980s and began shooting the film over a six-year period starting in 1982.⁷⁴

Rathburn’s score for The Defender is without doubt one of his oddest, due in large part to the inauthentic sound of the synthesizer on which the score was recorded, and to his relative unfamiliarity with electronic music in general. It is tempting to speculate that Low might have actually intended the music to sound somewhat comical, given the satirical nature of the film. If that were the case, however, Rathburn may not have been entirely in on the joke. In his notebooks he describes some of the frustrations and challenges he encountered during the preparation of the soundtrack:

This was my first real acquaintance with the synthesizer. The original plan was to work some WW2 tunes into this score, but that plan was thrown out. In 1987 I worked with Ben Low [Stephen’s brother] at his loft on St. Laurent Boulevard in Montreal. We had some really bad experiences, with bad [electronic sound] samples, and many hang-ups with the equipment … I even tried to beg off this film. However it was made, and it even won a prize out west!⁷⁵

Rathburn’s title theme for The Defender is shown in figure 4.4. This “sentence-type” phrase opens with a four-bar presentation phrase, consisting of a two-bar basic idea and its motivic repetition, in F major.⁷⁶ The following four-bar continuation phrase is characterized by slippery descending and modulatory chromaticism, and fragmentation of the presentation phrase’s motivic content, leading to a repetition of the eight-bar title theme in E_♭ major, a major second below the opening key. Apart from this curious theme, and odd moments of pentatonicism during the film sequences chronicling the restoration of the Japanese Zero, the score is otherwise unremarkable. It nonetheless serves its purpose well in this peculiar film. Discussing his experience with the project, Rathburn noted that, in his view, the synthesizer “should never be used to try to imitate something simply to save money; it should be used for its own sake.”⁷⁷ Yet given that the film is about Diemert’s “cheap imitation” of a warplane, it is possible that in asking Rathburn to record his score on a synthesizer producing “cheap imitations” of instrumental sounds, Low was actually striving to draw subliminal attention to an auditory analogy to the theme of his film.

Figure 4.4 • Rathburn’s title theme for Stephen Low’s The Defender (1989).

The Defender was broadcast on television in both Canada and the US, as well as in Cyprus, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the USSR, and the UK.78 At the 1989 Yorkton Film Festival it won in the “Best Production” category and received a Golden Sheaf Award for Stephen Low (Best Director).

Canadian Innovation and the Invention of IMAX Cinema

The story of the creation and expansion of IMAX cinema is a remarkable example of Canadian innovation.⁷⁹ In the mid-1940s, four teenaged schoolmates at the Galt Collegiate Institute (GCI) in Galt, Ontario (now Cambridge) – Graeme Ferguson (1929–), Robert Kerr (1929–2010), William Shaw (1929–2002), and Wolf Koenig (1927–2014) – met frequently to scheme and compare notes about their many artistic, scientific, and entrepreneurial dreams. “We’d spend our time thinking up interesting things to do, which mostly involved things that exploded (today we’d be arrested)!,” Ferguson told a reporter in 2010.⁸⁰ Ferguson, Kerr, and Shaw eventually teamed up to found the GCI’s student newspaper. Their dreams continued to soar, and twenty years later they would create the IMAX Corporation.

Shaw, who graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in mechanical engineering, had always had a penchant for invention and innovation. IMAX was founded upon his technologically ingenious invention of a complex projection system – involving successive stages of image capture and projection – that was required to present large-format, high-resolution and wide-angle images on gigantic screens, with films ten times larger than conventional 35 mm picture frames.81 Bob Green, another high school friend from the group’s Galt Collegiate Institute days, describes Shaw’s first IMAX projector prototype as “an awesome animal”:

Its light source came from a sort of bulb that NASA used to test materials for the effects of gamma rays. In the projector the dangerous rays had to be screened through a large quartz crystal, and its volcanic heat was dispersed by powerful fans through an octopus of furnace pipes. Enough heat still leaked through the projector lens to cause a fence board passed within a foot to burst into flames. The film ran on reels as large as manhole covers, lay horizontally, and was fed through the gate like a typewriter ribbon. This complexity caused the projector to weigh eleven tons and sit on four stout legs like a lunar landing craft. Atop this monster sat Barbara Shaw’s tiny green Hoover, its vacuum hose stretched to the gate. An industrial vacuum accompanied the projector to Osaka where its performance introduced IMAX to the world.⁸²

Joining forces to complement Shaw’s scientific and engineering skills, the other team members contributed a wide range of artistic, filmmaking, marketing, promotional, financing, political, entrepreneurial, and collaborative skills, abilities that were required to achieve their common goal. Kerr, who was then serving as the mayor of Galt (1964–68),⁸³ brought political, financial, and business acumen to the group. Ferguson was driven by a passion for filmmaking that had taken hold during his childhood years and would intensify when he pursued a BA at the University of Toronto. His talents and vision as a filmmaker would ultimately lead him to the NFB, where he became a regular collaborator with his high school friend Wolf Koenig and with two leading filmmakers who worked closely with Koenig in the Film Board’s legendary Unit B:

Colin Low and Roman Kroitor. The members of the group were close, both professionally and personally, as Kroitor had married Ferguson’s sister Janet in 1955. Although Koenig designed the IMAX Corporation’s first logo, he did not join this private venture spearheaded by Ferguson and his three entrepreneurial friends due to his resolute dedication to the publicly funded film production studios of the NFB, which he described as “a calling and a mission.”84 In 1967, the four partners founded and incorporated the “Multiscreen Corporation” (IMAX’s predecessor), with Ferguson as president. On 13 April 1970 the Multiscreen Corporation filed to change the company’s name to IMAX. Together, Ferguson, Shaw, Kerr, and Kroitor steered it for the next thirty years through a period of exponential expansion. The corporation won an Academy Award for scientific and technical achievement in 1986 (another would follow in 1997), and it was sold by the partners in 1994.⁸⁵ By that time, IMAX had become a multinational conglomerate with more than 250 theatres operating around the world. In 2008, IMAX extended its brand into traditional theatres with the introduction of Digital IMAX, a lower-cost system that allowed for the conversion of existing multiplex theatre auditoriums and helped IMAX to grow from 299 screens worldwide at the end of 2007 to over one thousand screens by the end of 2016.⁸⁶ The IMAX Corporation’s projection system is now widely acknowledged as the most significant innovation in the motion-picture industry in the late twentieth century.⁸⁷

In order to discuss the production of the earliest IMAX films, our story needs to rewind to 1965. During the summer months of that year, Graeme Ferguson was asked by the Expo Corporation to create a new film with the working title Man the Explorer – Man and the Polar Regions, for Montreal’s Expo 67. When Ferguson approached Kerr about setting up a film production company for the project, Kerr was still serving as mayor of Galt and managing his small printing company. He nonetheless agreed, and together they produced an important early multi-screen film titled Polar Life for Expo 67.⁸⁸ As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the NFB had also been approached by the Expo Corporation to create a novel new cinematic experience for Expo 67’s centennial celebration. Kroitor, Low, and O’Connor rose to the challenge and produced Labyrinth, the most innovative film experiment in the history of the Film Board, and arguably in the history of international documentary film to date. Wishing to build on these groundbreaking experiments in large-format multi-screen cinema, Ferguson, Shaw, Kroitor, and Kerr sought to take the cinematic experience to the next level with IMAX.

Director Donald Brittain’s Tiger Child (1970), a co-production of the newly incorporated Multiscreen Corporation and Asuka Productions of Japan (Roman Kroitor and Kichi Ichikawa, producers), was the first film ever presented with Shaw’s new projection technology and Rathburn’s first large-format film score. Brittain opted to use the music of Gordon Lightfoot for the soundtrack in place of an original film score. When it was screened in the Fuji Pavilion at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan, Tiger Child met with resounding success. One year later this success was followed by another one, when Ferguson’s North of Superior (1971) was given its premiere screening on 22 May 1971 at the opening of Toronto’s Ontario Place and Cinesphere, its feature attraction and the world’s oldest permanent IMAX theatre. Colin Low’s son Stephen, then twenty years old, worked on the Tiger Child production team as an apprentice.89 Fifteen years later, Stephen Low would make his IMAX directorial debut with the film Skyward (1985, discussed below), and would go on to become Canada’s leading IMAX filmmaker.

Circus World (1974)

Circus World (1974) was another private-sector film-scoring contract that Eldon accepted prior to his retirement from the Film Board. Although the film was neither funded nor formally supported by the NFB in any way, the team that called on him to score the film – Roman Kroitor, Graeme Ferguson, John Spotton, and Jackie Newell – were anything but new collaborators. On 11 July 1972 he received a brief letter, typed on Multiscreen Corporation letterhead, from Roman Kroitor: “I definitely want you to do the Circus movie music, sometime around November to December of this year. I would be very pleased if you would keep this in mind when you’re making your plans. I’ll let you know as long in advance as possible as to whether the cutting copy will be finished and ready for you to work on.”⁹⁰

In the margins of the letter Eldon scrawled a number of handwritten notes indicating that he was also communicating with Bob Kerr in Galt about the project, and with both cinematographer Graham Ferguson and Jackie Newell concerning the film’s budget. Given his acclaimed film scores for Labyrinth and Tiger Child, and the fact that he had a lifelong passion for the circus (see chapters 7 and 8), Kroitor’s Circus World was a natural assignment for Eldon. Another handwritten note scribbled on the bottom of the letter, “Fall Circus in Ottawa,” suggests that he may have planned to attend the circus when it visited Ottawa that September, perhaps for inspiration.

Figure 4.5 • Circus World’s enormous IMAX tent, ca. 1974.

The Circus World Showcase amusement park, located in Haines City, Florida (near Orlando), was the fulfillment of a dream for Irvin Feld, CEO of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and executive producer of the IMAX film.91 Billed as one of the park’s feature attractions, Circus World was screened twice daily in a 600-seat IMAX tent theatre. Unfortunately only Circus World Showcase attendees saw the film during the park’s years of operation, and the Circus World grounds were closed in 1986.⁹² Since that time, this important early IMAX film appears to have vanished, together with all remnants of Rathburn’s score.⁹³ We are left with only a collection of memories from those who viewed the film in Florida. The 1974 opening “was a great success” according to Jerry Digney, Circus World’s director of public relations and marketing at the time. “Back in 1974, IMAX was still a major novelty; the Circus World film – I wonder where it ended up? – was fantastic and played multiple times a day.”⁹⁴ According to Richard Flint of Baltimore, the film opened with “a massive elephant rising to face the audience (very impressive).” “Another sequence was shot from the [trapeze] platform; the camera actually went out with the swing of the fly-bar and made a slow motion somersault (incredible that these scenes are not forgotten after thirty five years)!”95 For Mike Naughton, who still remembers terrifying sequences shot from the perspective of two acrobats perched atop a swaypole, it felt “AS IF YOU WERE DOING IT, and it still sends a chill down my spine; it took me many years before I could watch a swaypole act again.”⁹⁶ International Clown Hall of Fame inductee Barry Lubin wrote of his excitement at the prospect of seeing Circus World again. Lubin was deeply disappointed when an August 2008 screening at the Ringling Theatre in Baraboo, Wisconsin, was cancelled when the canister thought to contain the film instead turned out to be empty.⁹⁷ Until an archival copy of the film has been found, we are left to speculate about the music Rathburn might have employed to complement these exhilarating scenes.

By the 1980s and early 1990s, Rathburn had established an international reputation as a go-to composer for multi-screen and large-format films. Between 1970 and 1992 he scored ten of the earliest IMAX films: Tiger Child (1970), Circus World (1974), Skyward (1985), Transitions (1986), Beavers (1988), The First Emperor of China (1989), The Last Buffalo (1990), Titanica (1991), and Momentum (1992). We will examine a selection of these films below.

Skyward (1985)

Rathburn recalled his collaboration on Skyward (1985) with great fondness. Among other things, Skyward was his first major scoring assignment for director Stephen Low, a fellow railroad enthusiast and the gifted son of Eldon’s longtime NFB colleague Colin Low. For Low, it was also his IMAX directorial debut. Carrying the viewer into the sky with a flock of Canada geese, the film chronicles the efforts of a conservationist to restore ecological balance to Florida’s Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, where Skyward was shot on location. Its three-year production process involved hatching, imprinting, training, and filming a flock of Canada geese up close, in both natural settings and wind tunnels, using novel IMAX slow-motion filming techniques and shooting at 45 frames per second.⁹⁸ The premiere screening of Skyward in the Suntory pavilion at the 1985 International Science and Technology Exposition in Tsukuba, Japan (Expo 85), met with widespread critical acclaim. Beth Landman of the New York Post called the result “a spectacular visual journey.”99 A Toronto Star review was equally effusive: “A Canada goose flies into view, every tiny feather perfectly defined. It is closer and clearer than any bird that has ever been caught on film … stunning!”¹⁰⁰ According to the Stephen Low Company’s website: “the clarity, intimacy and lyrical quality of these original images has arguably never been equaled.”¹⁰¹ For his part, Rathburn was pleased with his score: “There are a couple of excellent melodies in it, if I do say so myself.”¹⁰² Stephen Low concurred. “Eldon’s music is ecstasy,” he said. “He always got the emotion right and he always did fascinating things with the films he worked on. It was Eldon, as much as anyone else, who made the NFB’s reputation.”¹⁰³

Transitions (1986)

“I will soon be working on the soundtrack for a film for Expo 86,” Eldon wrote on 24 September 1984 to ethnomusicologist Dale Whiteside, his American friend and fellow Jew’s harp enthusiast.¹⁰⁴ His niece, Roberta Morris, recalls Eldon’s excitement about his forthcoming collaboration on Colin Low’s 3D IMAX film Transitions (1986). Roberta was visiting with Eldon and Margot during the summer of 1984 when Eldon received a call from Low summoning him to a meeting that had been scheduled at a downtown Ottawa hotel. Low, Tony Ianzelo, and other key members of the production team were to be in attendance. When he got off the phone Eldon asked Roberta, then age twenty-one, to accompany him. They attended the meeting together, with Roberta seated in the corner of the room as an observer. She recalls that Eldon’s excitement and energy were palpable as they drove home:¹⁰⁵

While I do not remember much about the content of the meeting, I very clearly remember Eldon’s excitement about the film project. He talked about it all the way home in the car and the conversation continued when we joined Margot at home. Eldon seemed pleased that I was able to attend the meeting, and he told me that he always found the early stages in the development of a film project an exciting process. I now appreciate (but did not at the time) that Eldon would have been 68 years of age on that day in 1984. At that age, most people have retired, and if they have not, they have often grown tired of their profession. Eldon still loved his work at age 68, and he was eager to share that enthusiasm with me.¹⁰⁶

Figure 4.6 • In Colin Low’s 3D NFB IMAX film Transitions (1986), Rathburn makes a cameo appearance accompanying newly arrived passengers in a lively polka on the railway platform.

Transitions was Rathburn’s most significant film project for the year 1985. Commissioned by the Canadian National Railway, it was the first IMAX film shot and screened in 3D (it is widely considered the common ancestor of 3D entertainment as we know it today).107 The world’s first permanent 3D IMAX cinema had been constructed by the CNR for Vancouver’s Expo 86, and Transitions was the first film featured in the new theatre. With neither dialogue nor commentary, the film presents a rapid-fire series of sequences that take the viewer on an exhilarating ride through the story of communications and transportation in Canada, highlighting their close historical relationship with each other, and with industrial development: “from birch bark canoe, steam engine railway, shipping and the telegraph, to the wonders of high-tech satellite communication and high-definition television,” with a dizzying array of other visual images and diversions in between.¹⁰⁸

Rathburn’s music is heard virtually from the beginning of the film to the end, the primary exception being animated sequences showing radio signals from earth pinging off orbiting satellites, presented in austere silence. Eldon works with a full palette of textures, instrumental colours, and genre references in this score. When paddling canoers reach open water, they are seemingly propelled forward by the grandeur of Rathburn’s rich orchestration and noble melody, its metre synchronized with their paddles (hearkening back to the strikingly similar musical image-painting he had employed in Stephen Greenlees’s 1947 NFB documentary Indian Canoemen, discussed in chapter 2). His skilful employment of film-scoring techniques such as these serve to further enlarge and ennoble the powerful moving images displayed on the massive IMAX screen. Banjo, harmonica, and Jew’s harp signal the arrival of the steam engine, and newly arrived passengers on a railroad platform dance to a lively polka played by Eldon himself in a cameo appearance, seated at an upright piano on the platform and dressed in the uniform of a railroad station manager (figure 4.6). Vaudevillian music reminiscent of the silent film era accompanies a slapstick sequence featuring the arrival of the motor car, and a 6/8 Cape Breton jig accompanies the lobster cull. Sparsely textured contrapuntal chamber music animates the workers in a bread factory, and Rathburn provides a transparent, playful texture of chamber instruments when the viewer visits a Willy Wonka–like toy factory. In this memorable sequence, the magic of Rathburn’s music both captures and enhances the awe experienced by the audience when a toy teddy bear rises off the factory assembly line and floats toward the viewer, an experience that was “sure to be every small child’s single most treasured memory of Expo ’86,” in the view of Vancouver film critic Michael Walsh.¹⁰⁹

Beavers (1988)

After director Stephen Low had so intimately and effectively captured a flock of Canada geese in flight in Skyward (1985), the Dentsu Entertainment and Chubu Electric Power Corporations asked him to develop another large-format film concept for potential sponsorship. Many alternative topics were discussed, but Low was determined to make another nature film, and this time on an even more quintessentially Canadian animal: the beaver. Reluctant at first (“Beavers, Mr. Low? Beavers?”), his Japanese sponsors eventually agreed.¹¹⁰ In Beavers (1988), Low sets out “to totally immerse the viewer in the world of the beaver … to swim and play amongst these creatures, face dangers with them and know their story.”¹¹¹ The film conveys an immense respect for the courageous and industrious animals whose daily behaviours it documents, as they construct and maintain their dam, care for their young, and battle predators and the elements. Film viewers were awestruck by the spectacular underwater (and under-ice) cinematographic work of Low and Andrew Kitzanuk, the film’s director of photography. Lyrical, humorous, and magical in its imagery, the project was an ideal one for Rathburn, who knew how to capture the mood “endearingly quirky and animated” like few other composers in film history, as we have seen in his score for Who Has Seen the Wind, and elsewhere. In his teaching at the University of Ottawa, he frequently noted that tricks for providing effective musical accompaniment for playful scenes need to be in every film composer’s tool kit.112 There are many such scenes in Beavers, and Rathburn scores them with great charm and skill (not surprisingly, given his renowned sense of humour and love of animals). The premiere screening took place at the Hamaoka Power Plant Visitor’s Centre IMAX Theatre on 28 April 1988, and Beavers was screened for several years running at Seattle’s Eames/IMAX Theater in the Pacific Science Center. It received both the “jury prize” and the “public prize” at the 1989 international large-format film Festival de la Géode (Paris), the New York Times hailed it as a “breathtaking” achievement, and Siskel and Ebert gave it “two thumbs up.” In 2004, Beavers was inducted into the IMAX Hall of Fame.¹¹³ Eldon must have enjoyed the punning subtitle in the film’s promotional posters: “The Best Dam Movie Ever Made!”

The Last Buffalo (1990)

With Transitions, Colin Low had pushed IMAX film technology to new and extreme limits. Four years later, following in his father’s footsteps, his son Stephen made a second 3D IMAX film. The Last Buffalo (1990), also scored by Rathburn, is “a dramatic and surreal poem with a poignant environmental message” and with a sci-fi twist.¹¹⁴ The film brings the viewer into close contact with majestic North American plains animals that are threatened with extinction. Set in the badlands of southern Alberta, Low’s documentary juxtaposes the sculpting of a buffalo statue with the real thing, and delivers a powerful environmental message. It has been described as “a landmark in the marriage of art and motion picture technology – five stars!”¹¹⁵ The Last Buffalo attracted two million viewers in six months in the Suntory Pavilion at Expo 90 in Osaka, Japan, where it was the most popular attraction. Yet notwithstanding the acclaim with which it was received, and the awe-inspired testimony of audience members who would often line up to see it three and four times – as well as the optimistic prognostications offered by Graeme Ferguson, among others, concerning the future of 3D cinema116 – Stephen Low would later renounce the complexity of 3D filmmaking in favour of 2D:

[My father] created the first ever 3D IMAX film (Transitions, 1986). I learned a lot on that and then I did the second one (The Last Buffalo, 1990). I’ve done a lot of 3D but I’ve reverted back to 2D because, for me, the 3D undermines the scale and the beautiful bigness of things, like the mountains. I’ve become a 2D enthusiast; 3D is very complicated to do well, and it’s often projected badly.¹¹⁷

The Last Buffalo received Japan’s Minister of the Environment Award (1990) as well as an “Outstanding Film Award” from the Audio Visual Association of Japan (1990).

The First Emperor of China (1991)

In the NFB/Xi’an IMAX film co-production The First Emperor of China (1991), Oscar-winning Canadian actor Christopher Plummer narrates the epic story of Zhao Zheng, prince of the state of Qin, who unified China and became its first emperor in 221 BC, after his armies conquered China’s six other warring states.¹¹⁸ Anticipating that his reign would be the first in a long dynastic succession, he assumed the title “Qin Shi Huang” (literally: “First Emperor of China”). Co-directors Tony Ianzelo and Liu Hao Xue opted to engage music only sparingly throughout the film. Rathburn’s sweeping orchestral score constitutes the bulk of the music heard, but co-composer Zhao Jiping’s music for traditional instruments also lends an authentically Chinese musical voice to the film. Rathburn’s score provides a heightened sense of foreboding in scenes depicting the gathering of the emperor’s great armies, and it deftly engages dissonance and violent militaristic brass and percussion to underscore scenes of conflict, death, and destruction on the battlefield. In The First Emperor more than in any other film score, Rathburn told Louis Hone, he often scored the full orchestra in unison to accompany scenes where large armies were marching in synchrony. “It’s a very Russian thing,” he quipped. “Mussorgsky does this [in Boris Gudonov].”¹¹⁹ When searching for inspiration and models, Rathburn often turned first to his extensive knowledge of the repertoire, and to his large collection of scores and recordings.

Titanica (1992)

Following on the heels of Roman Kroitor’s classic film Rolling Stones: Live at the Max (1991), a feature-length documentary chronicling the band’s Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour, Stephen Low’s Titanica (1992) is the IMAX Corporation’s second feature-length production. Thanks to the technological capabilities of specially-designed MIR submersibles – and an earnest crew of filmmakers, scientists, and oceanographers from the IMAX Corporation, the Russian Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, and the National Geographic Society – the high-tech camera and lighting equipment dove to the frigid depths of the North Atlantic Ocean to visit the wreckage of the Titanic, the luxury ocean liner that sank off the coast of Newfoundland on 14–15 April 1912.120 The astonishing underwater footage captured by Low and his colleagues inspired Canadian-born director James Cameron to create the epic feature film Titanic (1997), which would win eleven Oscars for Twentieth Century Fox and become one of the top-grossing films of all time.¹²¹ In 1998, Titanica was re-released in a shorter, small-screen DVD format, narrated by Leonard Nimoy.¹²² In 2011, it received the prestigious “Maximum Image Award” from the IMAX Hall of Fame.

Rathburn wrote relatively little original music for Titanica (1992). Instead, his role was largely that of musical arranger, and he engaged a wide range of period waltzes, honky-tonk piano music, and other early twentieth-century popular and classical music (including Enrico Toselli’s Serenata) to animate the historical images on the screen. As in his father’s classic documentary City of Gold (1957), Low engages Eldon’s music largely to accompany still photographs from the period, images that Low had found in the archives of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilder that launched the Titanic in 1912. “Eldon was a musical genius,” enthused Howard Baer, who conducted the score for the film’s soundtrack, as he recalled the collaboration. “I respected and admired Eldon deeply.” “He became a good friend through the late 80s and early 90s, as we worked together on three IMAX films” (The Last Buffalo, The First Emperor, and Titanica).¹²³

Momentum (1992)

Directors Colin Low and Tony Ianzelo, cinematographer Ernest McNabb, and composer Eldon Rathburn – the same creative team that had produced Transitions for Expo 86 – combined forces once again to produce Momentum (1992) for the Canadian Pavilion at the Seville World’s Fair (Expo 92). The NFB website describes Momentum as a “breathtaking tribute to Canadian geography, culture, technology and travel … [in which] the viewer boards an icebreaker, scales a mountain gorge, soars through clouds in the nosecone of a jet, and joins a dog team in a heart-pounding race across frozen Arctic lake.”124 It was the first IMAX film shot in the company’s new high-definition 48-frames-per-second format, and one of the first films to employ Ambisonic full-sphere surround sound technology. When he scored his last IMAX films in Montreal, Rathburn’s regular working routine was impressive in its simplicity. According to sound engineer Louis Hone, Eldon would take the train from Ottawa to Montreal, book himself into a room at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, and lock himself in at night in order to prepare the score without interruption.¹²⁵ Momentum would be Rathburn’s last major film scoring project.

Eldon told Louis Hone that Colin Low explicitly asked him to create a “signature unifying theme” for Momentum.¹²⁶ Having decided that a folk song–based principal theme might be ideal for this project, Eldon went straight to the Ottawa Public Library to pour through collections of Canadian folk song.¹²⁷ Possibly out of a desire to underscore the ways in which urban and industrial development had taken a toll on Canada’s natural landscape, he settled upon “The Indian’s Lament,” a song that paints a dreary picture of the plight of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, who “sang of the days when the land was their own.”¹²⁸ During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “The Indian’s Lament” was ubiquitous in central and eastern Canada, a fact demonstrated by its inclusion in at least four collections – Helen Creighton’s Song and Ballads of Nova Scotia, E.C. Beck’s Lore of the Lumber Camps, Kenneth Peacock’s Songs of the Newfoundland Outports,¹²⁹ and Edith Fowke’s recorded collection Folk Songs of Ontario – at least one of which Eldon undoubtedly consulted at the Ottawa Public Library in 1991.¹³⁰ A few years later Rathburn told Louis Hone how, after first presenting his Momentum theme in its original folk song setting, he proceeds to write a series of variations on the tune and harmonization.¹³¹ One of Rathburn’s variations is shown in figure 4.7. When this variation (bottom of the figure) is compared to the original tune (top of the figure), a few noteworthy features become evident. The original tune presents a sixteen-bar melodic and harmonic “period-type” phrase structure in 3/4 metre, a design that is characteristic of countless North American folk songs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Note that the first four measures of Rathburn’s 4/4 variation are derived from the last four measures of the original tune (the last phrase’s first and last four notes in particular). Rathburn’s next four measures are based on the last four bars of the tune’s eight-bar antecedent phrase and the identical first four bars of its eight-bar consequent phrase. After presenting the opening eight measures of his variation, Rathburn then presents two four-bar variations on his principle theme, each of which is colourfully presented in a chromatic-mediant-related key a minor-third below – D major, modulating to B major, modulating to A_♭ major – while the melody sweeps triumphantly higher with each modulation. Also noteworthy is Rathburn’s filmic placement of his sixteen-bar variation. Curiously, he juxtaposes and effectively “counterpoints” the most salient structural features in his score’s four- and eight-bar phrases against the on-screen changes in Low’s breathtaking images (captured from a camera installed in the nose cone of a jet airplane). When Low’s images change from a bird’s-eye view of the lakes of Manitoba as seen through the clouds, to a fly-over of the expansive and fertile Saskatchewan prairies, Rathburn’s music is still in measure 6, fully two bars away from the first modulation (to B major). When the modulation arrives two bars and nearly eight seconds later, the music somehow imbues the prairie scene with even more awe-inspiring beauty and majesty. An identical film/music disjuncture is used to excellent effect in measures 11 and 12. When Low’s images change from the Saskatchewan prairies to a glacial landscape in the Canadian Rockies, Rathburn’s music is still in measure 10, two bars ahead of the next dramatic modulatory moment (to A_♭ major). When the colourful modulation arrives two bars later, an overwhelming feeling of the durability, permanence, and expansiveness conveyed by the glaciers is somehow newly amplified by the dignity of the music and by the emotion the modulation conveys. The tone and character of the film and music change abruptly when these majestic shots of Canadian landscape are suddenly interrupted by a shot of Toronto’s Skydome sports complex. Rathburn’s score comes to an abrupt stop at this moment and lingers there, as the Skydome’s gargantuan retractable roof slowly opens, with a sustained, piercing, and suspenseful unison pitch “C” in the violins (as shown in measures 15–16 of figure 4.7). Rathburn’s comments on scoring IMAX films are particularly revealing in this context:

Figure 4.7 • Top: “The Indian’s Lament” (traditional folk song, author’s transcription). Bottom: A variation on “The Indian’s Lament” from Rathburn’s film score for Momentum (IMAX, 1992).

IMAX films usually need a certain fullness of sound on account of the very large screen (90' × 60') and the speaker system covers the front sides and rear of the theatre.132

In IMAX films, there is often no commentary. The music has to sustain the scenes. A full sound is often needed, but it should not be overwritten. You need to call on all of your skills, for example by modulating keys, as the scenes change. Going over cliffs? Use that as a crescendo. You have to pinpoint all of these things in order to make the music interesting and serve a purpose. Working on an IMAX film is quite different from working on a film with commentary, especially if there are no sound effects. You can’t let down, and there is always the danger of overwriting. IMAX film is like a coffee table book, very visual, for the senses, a feast of images.¹³³

Rathburn divided his score for Momentum into nine distinctly titled sections, most of which embody further variations on the principal theme shown in figure 4.7. Each section corresponds to the film’s formal and thematic divisions: (1) “Majestic Scene” (4:13), (2) “Seascape with Lights” (1:52), (3) “Flamenco Scene” (0:50), (4) “Northern Mystery” (2:11), (5) “Spanish March/Cancan” (0:50), (6) “Western Scene” (1:33), (7) “Vista Heroique” (2:31), (8) “Boogie and Blues” (2:20), (9) “Momentum Waltz” (1:28, scrolling of the credits).

“Majestic Scene” opens with an insistent ostinato combined with richly dissonant brass in a gradual crescendo that creates a powerful sense of foreboding as a massive icebreaker approaches the viewer. There was a minor but revealing disagreement between sound engineer Louis Hone and Rathburn concerning the final mix of Momentum’s opening scene. Hone was disappointed and frustrated with the final mix:

One big disappointment was Momentum, which opens with a shot of an approaching icebreaker (huge on the IMAX screen). I delivered a mix-down of the recorded music. But as was often the case, I was not involved in the final session where they prepared the final mix. When I heard the final playback, the music starts, and it builds up and builds up and just as it’s about to build up further and become splendid … it’s drowned out by the boat! Everyone knows what a boat sounds like! They could have toned it down and let the music take over. I said “Oh God!” And they said “Louis you’ve gotta understand that the boat is huge on the screen.” Eldon and other composers loved to be at my (music) mix, because they knew that it would be the last time they would hear the music properly, in all of its splendour.¹³⁴

In this instance, Rathburn disagreed. On the contrary, he felt that the swamping of his music by the sound of the boat in Momentum’s opening scene was entirely appropriate and effective. However he always emphasized the importance of understanding that “the composer is part of a team”: “If you want to write an autonomous piece, then write a concert music piece. In some cases, if the film works better with the music turned down, or drowned out with sound effects, then that’s the right thing to do.”¹³⁵

Hone has offered further impressions of the powerful opening measures of Eldon’s score for Momentum when he first heard them. Rathburn composed the score and conducted the Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal in a recording made at l’Église Saint Pierre l’Apôtre on the rue de la Visitation in downtown Montreal. Hone recalls the recording sessions:

Although I’ve worked with so many fine film composers at the NFB and elsewhere, not often in my career have I gone “wow, that’s truly spectacular”! But I remember Eldon writing and recording the orchestral score for Momentum when he was getting on in years, in the early 1990s. It was a very cold January day when we recorded the score at l’Église Saint Pierre l’Apôtre downtown. Sitting in the mobile studio truck in the parking lot, I remember speaking to Eldon in his headset: “Ok Eldon, we’re ready, we’re rolling, go ahead.” Then Eldon gave the downbeat and the orchestra started. I’m not a hairy fellow but I looked down at my arms and the hair was standing on end, and I’m thinking “this is just ‘wow’!” “Boy Eldon, you haven’t lost it!” Eldon was so professional, so modest, so human, and so very good at what he does.136

“My whole experience … has been one big crescendo,” Rathburn told Louis Hone.¹³⁷ In a career trajectory that had carried him aloft on a gradual crescendo since 1947, the Momentum IMAX project was indeed yet another peak experience.