Roman Kroitor (December 12, 1926 – September 17, 2012) was a Canadian filmmaker who was known as a pioneer of Cinéma vérité, as the co-founder of IMAX, and as the creator of the Sandde hand-drawn stereoscopic 3D animation system. He was also the original inspiration for The Force. His prodigious output garnered numerous awards, including two BAFTA Awards, three Cannes Film Festival awards, and two Oscar nominations.

Early life

Roman Boghdan Kroitor was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, to Ukrainian immigrants Peter and Tatiana (Shewchuk), both of whom were teachers. Peter died when Roman was four; Tatiana moved the family to Winnipeg and continued teaching. Roman attended the University of Manitoba, graduating in 1951 with a Master of Arts in Philosophy.

National Film Board of Canada

In 1949 and 1950, Kroitor attended the Summer Intern program at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in Ottawa. Upon graduation from university, he was hired full-time, working as a production assistant and later as a film editor. His first film, 1953's Rescue Party laid the foundation for his pioneering Cinéma vérité style, and he went on to produce influential films such as Lonely Boy, Glenn Gould: On the Record, Glenn Gould: Off the Record, and the concert film Stravinsky. By 1958, Kroiter was producing documentaries; by 1964, he was one of the producers leading the NFB into the production of fiction films.

IMAX

After seeing the ground-breaking NFB documentary Universe (1960), Stanley Kubrick tried to recruit Kroiter and Colin Low to work on 2001: A Space Odyssey. They declined because, with Hugh O'Connor and Tom Daily, they were working on a large-scale multi-screen film. This was In the Labyrinth, which the NFB exhibited at Expo 67 in Montreal. The film caused a sensation and, in the same year Kroitor and his friend and colleague, the director Graeme Ferguson, left the NFB as employees, but physically stayed, founding Multi-Screen Corporation (later IMAX Corp.) in the NFB's Montreal studios (with two other friends, Robert Kerr and engineer Bill Shaw). The Multi-Screen process involved a purpose-built camera, and 70mm film projected horizontally rather than vertically, with each frame the size of a postcard. In 1970, for Expo 70 in Osaka, Kroitor produced the first IMAX film, the 17-minute Tiger Child, directed by Donald Brittain. In 1973, he returned to the NFB as a producer in charge of the Drama department, but continued to make IMAX films until his retirement. In 1990, he co-directed the first IMAX feature film, Stones at the Max. He also produced the first IMAX stereoscopic (S3D) film, We Are Born of Stars (anaglyph, 1985), and co-produced the first full-color OMNIMAX (IMAX Dome) S3D film, Echoes of the Sun (alternate-eye, 1990).

SANDDE

While working to create traditional (actuality) and early CG films in a stereoscopic format, Kroitor became frustrated with the lack of direct interaction between the desires of (right-brained) artists and the results on film, because everything had to pass through the (left-brained) mathematicians and programmers. He conceived of the SANDDE hardware and software system as a way to allow artists to directly draw, in full stereoscopic 3D, what they want the audience to see.

George Lucas and The Force

Kroitor was credited by Star Wars creator George Lucas, as being the origin of the concept of The Force, an important thematic element in the Star Wars films. As reported by The Globe and Mail, Lucas first heard about "the force" in a conversation between Kroitor and Warren Sturgis McCulloch, an artificial intelligence guru, in 21-87'', a 1963 collage film made by the NFB's Arthur Lipsett. Disagreeing with McCulloch's assertion that humans are nothing more than highly complex machines, Kroitor argued,: "Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God."

Personal life and death

In 1955, Kroitor married (Graeme Ferguson's sister) Janet Ferguson; they had five children and lived in Montreal. On September 17, 2012, he died of a heart attack in his sleep at the age of 85.

Filmography

National Film Board of Canada

Awards

Paul Tomkowicz: Street-Railway Switchman (1953) Blood and Fire (1958) The Back-Breaking Leaf (1959) The Cars in Your Life (1960) Universe (1960) The Days of Whiskey Gap (1961) Lonely Boy (1962) The Living Machine (1962) The Hutterites (1964) Above the Horizon (1964) Nobody Waved Goodbye (1964) Legault’s Place (1964) Stravinsky (1965) Bargain Basement (1976) For Gentlemen Only (1976) One Man (1977) Henry Ford's America (1977) Voice of the Fugitive (1978) Teach Me to Dance (1978) Revolution's Orphans (1979) Why Men Rape (1979) Bravery in the Field (1979) Challenger: An Industrial Romance (1980) Nose and Tina (1980)

Footnotes