Eldon Rathburn: They Shoot... He Scores
1995 · 26m · Canada
Directed by Louis Hone
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Composer Eldon Rathburn looks back on joining the NFB in 1947 and scoring more than three hundred films. He recalls falling for movie music as a boy in Saint John and creating scores for works from City of Gold to Momentum.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A reverential portrait of a composer's institutional loyalty—the kind of safe, respectful documentary that makes Felix's skin crawl; Rathburn deserves better than hagiography, and so do we.
Hone's tender excavation of Rathburn's archive positions him within the NFB's golden lineage and the deeper tradition of film scoring itself, a measured meditation on craft inheritance that feels essential to cinema's own history.
The counterintuitive choice to let Rathburn's voice and memory carry the film rather than restage his past gives the piece an intimacy that validates a quarter-century of invisible labor—his words become the score.