North of Superior

This is a fantastic film. It starts off with a shot from a twin engined aircraft skimming across Lake Superior at high speed to the beat of a tom-tom. The effect on the huge Imax screen is exhilarating.The movie also has many other excellent aerial shots as well as ones taken on the ground. The overall impression is one of awe and beauty for the great northern landscapes shown in the film.

North of Superior is not just about scenery. There are scenes of a wedding, a tugboat breaking ice, an Indian reservation, a forest fire, tree planting, among others. However, the film can only give a very abbreviated snapshot of life in this part of northern Ontario as it is only 18 minutes long.

The unnarrated soundtrack features an original song most appropriate to the theme, "What kind of man would come to this country?/ What kind of country would take him away?" This song perhaps characterized the movie perfectly. It's a film about a ruggedly beautiful land with a unique charm that has attracted people from all over the world.

The Cinesphere at Ontario Place in Toronto is the world's original IMAX theatre. The film that showcased the IMAX process there for years was this one, North of Superior. Did people get tired of seeing it again and again? No way, not with its combination of earth and sky, forest fires and swooping light plane rides.

It was wonderful to have the natural splendour of the province celebrated in such a spectacular film. We weren't used to seeing our own country on the big screen. Nowadays, it's even harder to find something as thoroughly and recognizably Canadian as this up there.

Ultimately, this is a travelogue of Ontario north of Lake Superior, a thinly populated area of enormous forests, ancient rocks and long, cold winters. An Ontario-themed Imax movie was needed for the opening of the new Ontario Place park in Toronto in 1971 (which featured the Cinesphere, the worlds first permanent Imax theatre), and North of Superior was the result. Despite being shot in the early seventies, most of the images within it are timeless, and could just as easily have been filmed in the same places today. Like most Imax films, it is shot to thrill the audience with images that convey the impression of motion as well as any medium I've ever seen. Some Imax films seem like just a collection of spectacular images meant to show off this effect and nothing more, but North of Superior (like the best of the Imax films) does much more than this. The motion effect is well used to get across the immensity and power of nature in the area (most particularly in the opening and closing scenes, as well as the forest fire sequence), but I think the film would still have an impact without the Imax motion effect. I would dearly love to have a DVD copy, in the unlikely event that such a thing were ever made available.

This wasn't the first Imax film I ever saw, but it had a profound impact on me from the first time I saw in in 1975. The only other Imax film that has ever come close in its impact is "The Dream is Alive" -- which had much more spectacular material to work with. In days past, when admission to the Cinesphere was free with your days admission to Ontario Place, my friends and I would watch this four or five times in a row if they would let us. I've never tired of the images it offers, perfectly complemented on the soundtrack by Bill Houston's "Ojibway Country", the words of which are a perfect fit for what's on the screen. If I wanted to give someone a quick introduction to what Northern Ontario is really like, or to convey how effective Imax can be as cinema, I don't think I could do it better than to have them see "North of Superior".

Recently, Ontario Place Cinesphere celebrated it's 30th anniversary, I was priveleged to be working for IMAX at the time and to see the newly retouched transfer was just as stunning as 30 years ago. I still clearly remember my mother's gasp when the film opens to the fly-over of Lake Nipigon. Bill Houston also performed "Ojibway Country" live

This is the first, and most widely seen, of the Canadian IMAX films - a true classic that showed at Ontario Place for years. I saw it there in 1983, and years later discovered that my new wife's Father appeared in the movie (he was the game warden who hangs off the helicopter to tag a moose swimming across a lake). He has a frame of the 70mm film as a memento, but I've never found a DVD or VHS release from IMAX, even though all their newer films are available for purchase. Perhaps they feel that this one is too dated, or not exciting enough, but for those who have seen it, no doubt it is one they remember well. Also, I understand that on the 30th Anniversary of the Ontario Place IMAX (in 2001) they had a re-touched print of the film showing, and I would have thought that that might have stirred interest in a home video release. If anyone has other information on this, please add a comment here.