The short film North of Superior, which launched both the Imax format and the Cinesphere movie theatre at Toronto's Ontario Place back in 1971, begins with a little technical witticism. Down at the bottom of that giant black screen, a small, unimpressive rectangle of shimmering blue water appears briefly. That would be about the size of your regular movie screen: And then the image blows open to the nine-times-larger format that is Imax as the viewer goes soaring vertiginously over the lakes and forests of Northern Ontario.
Today it may be hard to imagine what it was like to see Imax for the very first time, but as Cinesphere reopens to the public after a five-year absence, the North of Superior opening sequence can still elicit the kind of visceral thrill that it did back in the seventies and eighties. Oooh, we're flying.
Still, as the provincial government phases in its reopening of the waterfront Ontario Place site, North of Superior is hardly the main attraction. The 18-minute, dialogue-free tribute to northern life and landscape is a modern classic, but nobody is expecting it will lure viewers now accustomed to seeing superheroes and action men parade across the smaller Imax screens at their local multiplex.
The short film North of Superior launched both the Imax format and Cinesphere in 1971.
Ontario Place Corporation
Instead, Cinesphere's not-so-secret weapon in the battle for audiences is the 2017 war movie Dunkirk, shot by the British director Christopher Nolan in the Imax format and processed on chemical film. Sure, you may have seen a digital Imax version of it at the mall this summer, but if you want to see real 70mm Imax film stock run through an original, big-format film projector onto the 18-metre-high and 24-metre-wide screen, Cinesphere is offering a bigger, brighter and even more impressive Dunkirk.
"When we first invented Imax, everyone said, 'What are you going to do with it?' We would wave our arms and promise great things," Graeme Ferguson, director of North of Superior and co-founder of Imax, told the audience Thursday at a Cinesphere media opening that featured a double bill of his film and Nolan's. "I think Dunkirk fulfills our dreams; this is exactly why we invented Imax, to give filmmakers like Christopher Nolan a tool to push further and make greater films."
Seeing Dunkirk's air, land and sea battles at Cinesphere, the film's impressive panoramic effects are further heightened – so you may even find yourself moving your gaze around the screen, the way you examine a painting or a large-scale photograph in an art gallery. Aerial shots of the beach and long views of the architecture of Dunkirk are particularly striking. The final sequence, showing a plane landing on the beach with the abandoned seaside town behind it, is breathtaking.
The provincial government is phasing in its reopening of the waterfront Ontario Place site.
Michelle Siu/The Globe and Mail
Nolan, who attended an initial Cinesphere screening of Dunkirk during the Toronto International Film Festival in September, has pronounced this as the best possible way to see his movie. And yes, it's film stock – the reel weighs about 100 kilograms – so you may even spot the odd mark on the otherwise perfect picture. It's an almost Proustian experience for those raised on old movies.
Dunkirk was shot on exactly the same kind of giant (and loud) Imax camera that Ferguson used for North of Superior but, paradoxically perhaps, when the older film screens at Cinesphere it is a digital copy projected through the latest Imax laser projector: The only way to preserve old films is by transferring them over to new formats. Meanwhile, Dunkirk unspools through a film projector that is an updated version of the original Imax projector now in the collection of the Canadian Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa.
Ferguson, 88, also recalled how the fledging Imax company was about to go broke when he was introduced to architect Eberhard Zeidler, who designed the distinctive white Cinesphere globe, and the Ontario bureaucrats who had commissioned a new auditorium they had nothing to put in. As it drops an anchor for Ontario Place revitalization, Cinesphere has a lot of history on offer – both cinematic and otherwise.
Dunkirk and Disney's Beauty and the Beast are currently screening at Cinesphere, through Nov. 12. Ontario Place will also offer a winter festival of illuminated artwork and ice skating on an artificial surface from December through March; see ontarioplace.com.