CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: IMAX: A Canadian Big-Screen Innovation

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Visitors to Expo 67 in Montreal lined up for hours to see some of the fair’s most talked-about attractions: films projected across several screens at the same time. Among the Canadian filmmakers behind these experiments were Graeme Ferguson and Roman Kroitor. The crowds’ enthusiasm convinced them that audiences wanted something far bigger than an ordinary cinema could offer. The multi-screen shows, however, required several projectors running side by side, and keeping the separate images perfectly matched was a constant headache. Together with businessman Robert Kerr and engineer William Shaw, Ferguson and Kroitor set out to create a single projector that could fill an enormous screen on its own. Their company would eventually become known as IMAX, short for “Image Maximum.”

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Their solution was surprisingly simple in principle: turn the film on its side. In a conventional projector, film travels vertically, so the width of each frame is limited by the width of the film. IMAX film runs horizontally instead, which allows each frame to stretch across fifteen perforations of 70 mm film. The result is an image roughly ten times the size of a standard 35 mm frame. Putting this idea into practice was far from simple, however. Pulling such large frames through a projector at high speed risked tearing or scratching the film, so the team adopted a “rolling loop” mechanism that moves the film gently and holds each frame steady while it is projected. The reels, too, had to be much larger than those used in ordinary theatres.

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The format made its public debut in 1970 at the world’s fair in Osaka, Japan, where the film Tiger Child was shown on a giant screen. The following year, the first permanent IMAX theatre opened at Ontario Place in Toronto, inside a dome-shaped building called the Cinesphere. For roughly the next three decades, IMAX theatres were found mainly in science centres and museums. Their programs consisted largely of documentaries about subjects such as wildlife, the oceans and space exploration, which made the most of the huge screen. Several of these films were shot with IMAX cameras carried into orbit aboard the space shuttle, giving audiences a breathtaking view of Earth from above.

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In the early 2000s, the company began digitally converting Hollywood films so that they could be shown in its theatres, and today many major releases appear in IMAX versions. Digital and, later, laser projection systems removed the need for expensive film prints and made it possible to install IMAX screens inside existing multiplex cinemas. Some film enthusiasts complain that these screens are smaller than the giant ones of the past and water down the original experience. Even so, the format has spread to theatres in dozens of countries, and well-known directors continue to film key scenes with IMAX cameras. More than half a century after Expo 67, an idea born from frustration with multiple projectors remains one of the most recognized names in cinema.