A Place to Stand (1967)

“#A place to stand, a place to grow, Ontariariario…#”. And oddly enough, fifty years on this is reminiscent of those interstitials we get at the Eurovision song contest when each host country exhibiting something beautiful or quirky about itself. This one condenses all that is impressive about this Canadian province into a quickly paced montage of moving photographs that depict just about everything from it’s human resources to it’s natural ones. Virgin and ancient forests and pristine lakes contrast with industrial scale logging and mining; the vast expanses of open grassland with the metropolitan Toronto and the Great Lakes that border with the United States. Aside from the geographic and natural virtues it extols, it also illustrates the Canadian people as a vibrant and creative bunch. Art, music, theatre all thrive as does sport of an international and more domestic variety and, of course, there are it’s roots which are celebrated using both the ceremonial and the individual. The style of presentation delivers postcards, ever updating and integrating and the storyboard for this must have been an impressively comprehensive work that showcases this as a land of plenty, of beauty and of opportunity. I have to say, though, that after about five minutes I’d rather got the message and I did get a bit weary of the constantly churning images and the increasingly twee rhymes that substitute for a narration. It’s not so much a film as an amalgam of quick-fire, quarter-screen, tourist board videos and I didn’t really love it.