Eldon Rathburn - Labyrinthe
Friday, November 7th, 2008
This post is dedicated to Canadian composer Eldon Rathburn, who died in Ottawa on 30 August 2008. Rathburn composed Labyrinthe for a special National Film Board of Canada pavilion at Expo-67.
Liner notes about the Labyrinth:
Outside a 5-storey windowless structure, one of the many architectureal features of Expo ‘67, a long queue of visitors waits patiently, sometimes for hours in the rain, to gain admittance to the Labyrinth.
Why this magnetic appeal?
It is a unique blend of film images, architecture, music and sound effects, and each of these is its own attraction. But more than the dazzle of a complex film presentation, of brilliant stereophonic sound, and a of powerful architecture, is the fascination of the theme, for the emotions generated by the whole experience taken together inevitably lead the visitor to a mysterious search - to a journey into himself.
As in the labyrinths of antiquity, with their winding corridors, dead ends, and menacing minotaur, their puzzling search for the one way out, the visitor is set off through a symbolic maze of life. In theatres unlike any built before, from images, and sounds gathered around the world, emerges the cycle of every man’s life: his entry into the world, his energies and aspirations, his confidence and uncertainty, his sufferings and his sacrafices, the desolation of death and the ever-renewed promise of birth.
The movement of the audience through the physical structure is an integral part of the experience. As one enters, an almost ceremonial procession through the shadowy winding corridors, accompanied by haunting music, prepares the senses and the mind for what is to come. In the breath-taking first theatre the audience gazes from eight balconies onto a long narrow screen far below on the floor and onto a similarly elongated vertical screen on the wall ahead. Here are played out life’s first hopes, and its first great disillusionments.
Next one proceeds to “The Maze”, a complex of twisting aisles, thousands of tiny sparkling coloured lights mirrored into infinity, and electronically prepared music, all forming an interlude which suggests as yet undiscovered resources in one’s inner life.
In the third and last chamber five film screens arranged in the form of a cross confront the visitor. On them an interplay of pictures as different ordinary film as poetry from prose, tells 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.
From the last quiet image of a sea-scape accompanied by a tranquil face carved into stone, the viewer exits onto a balcony over-looking the broad sweep of the St. Lawrence River, to face the reality of his own particular world again.
Through Eldon Rathburn’s vivid, evocative music, and other elements of the sound track, all superbly recorded and specially prepared for this unique phonogrpahic experience, this record recreates the many moods of the Labyrinth.
The production was hailed by TIME magazine as proof that cinema “has just begun to explore its boundaries and possibilities”. It used 35mm and 70mm film projected simultaneously on five screens in a cross formation and was the precursor of today’s IMAX format. Shortly after Expo-67, co-director Roman Kroitor left the National Film Board of Canada to co-found Multi-Screen Corporation, which later became IMAX Corporation.
The Labyrinth building at Expo-67 consisted of three main chambers: Theatre One, which ran two 70mm projectors in a unique floor-and-end-wall combination; The Maze, an apparently limitless series of mirrors and red “grain-of-wheat” bulbs; and Theatre Three, which projected five simulataneous 35mm projections in a cross formation.
In 1979, the NFB re-issued In the Labyrinth in a single-screen format. In May 2007, the NFB and the Cinémathèque Québécoise presented an exhibition at the Labyrinth pavilion, marking the 40th anniversary of Expo 67.
Descriptions of the Labyrinthe experience from the 7 July 1967 edition of TIME magazine:
In the vaulted chambers of a windowless, five-story building, the viewer follows a restatement of the Greek myth of Theseus, who entered a labyrinth on the island of Crete to slay the monstrous Minotaur. In the pavilion the labyrinth is evoked by a series of eerie corridors and chambers, including one auditorium where audiences peer down from galleries on a swimming pool-sized screen. At the same time, an oblong screen, 38 ft. high, confronts them at eye level. Sometimes Labyrinth uses the two screens to show off: 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. Most often it is employed to generate vertigo, as when a trapeze artist dangles above a crowd, or when two men have a highball-to-highball confrontation with a swiveling stripper.
Sonic Boon. Another chamber shows five screens arranged in the shape of a cross. In the most effective sequence, an African hunter peers out at the jungle, spear in hand, searching the waters for a crocodile. Around him the night seethes ominously. When at last he kills his quarry, the screens abruptly fill with white-eyed death masks that seem, for once, as terrifying to the viewer as they must be to the native. Labyrinth’s narration is sometimes painfully portentous: “The hardest place to look is inside yourself, but that is where you will find the beast. . .” But for the most part it is a sonic boon, admirably understating Labyrinth’s stunning visual display.
Sound Engineering:
The Labyrinth required the creation of new equipment and new recording techniques for service both on location throughout the world and for re-recording in the building at Expo.
For location recording, a small, portable, stereo, pilot-tone recorder was developed, using two Nagra recorders arranged in tandem. For re-recording and mixing inside the Labyrinth a specially-designed mixing console was constructed and moved from chamber to chamber as the re-recording progressed. Only in this way could the effect of twenty different tracks feeding 858 speakers arranged in a variety of configurations be gauged. This record was prepared in the studios of the National Film Board, Montreal, using 3M 4-track, 1/2-inch tape players, Ampex 1/4-inch recorders, Altec speakers and the NFB console.
I highly recommend downloading the entire album, but if you would like to sample a taste first, check out my City Faces remix. It consists of a 14-second sample from Out of the Labyrinthe inserted at the beginning of City Faces. You can listen to the remix in the player below:
Track Listing:
1) Birth
2) City Faces
3) Tranquility
4) The Minotaur
5) The Wind in my Hand
6) Confident Youth
7) Into the Labyrinthe
8) Out of the Labyrinthe
9) The Universe spins on the point of my Head
10) Farewell to a Hero
11) Celebration
12) Thresherman’s Reunion
Biography:
Labyrinthe composer Eldon (Davis) Rathburn was born in Queenstown, New Brunswick, Canada on 21 April 1916. After early piano studies with Eric Rollinson in Saint John, NB, where he also played in Don Messer’s band, Eldon Rathburn won a CPRS scholarship for his compositions Silhouette (1936) and To a Wandering Cloud (1938). In 1938-9, he studied composition with Healey Willan, organ with Charles Peaker, and piano with Reginald Godden. For his Symphonette (1943) he received first prize in the Los Angeles Young Artists’ Competition (1944). He was a danceband pianist, church organist, and radio arranger 1939-47 in Saint John before joining the NFB, Ottawa, where he was a staff composer 1947-76. He taught film-music composition 1972-6 at the University of Ottawa. In common with other NFB composers, Rathburn developed a light-textured and economical style readily adaptable to the mood of a film.
By 1976, in addition to many concert works, Eldon Rathburn had composed 185 film scores (mostly shorts for the NFB) including To the Ladies (1947), Family Circle (1949), Children’s Concert (1951), The Romance of Transportation (1952), Who Will Teach Your Child? (1952), City of Gold (1957; the basis for a symphonic suite of the same name), Universe (1960), Drylanders (1963; his first feature-length score), Labyrinth (1967, a multi-screen extravaganza for which a special theatre was built at Expo 67; recorded on Dominion LAB-650S), Pillar of Wisdom (1968), The World of Paul Kane (1973), The Road to Green Gables (1975; for CBC TV), and Who Has Seen the Wind (1977; feature film). The NFB scores (1947-64) are listed in Musique et cinéma. In retirement in Ottawa, Rathburn remained active, composing and doing research on music with a railroad theme. His scores included music for the IMAX films Skyward (1984), Transitions (1986), The First Emperor of China (a China-Canada co-production 1989), and the NFB tribute to Norman McLaren, The Creative Process (1990). His scores are deposited at the National Library of Canada. Eldon Rathburn was a member of the CLComp and an associate of the Canadian Music Centre.
