Screening times:
Friday, December 12, 6:30 PM - director attending!
Ron Mann | Canada | 2025 | 73m
“Clairtone was already history by the time I was a child. By the time I was old enough to talk about those kinds of things to my father. But for him, it loomed large. It had always loomed large right to the end of his life. He would say, 'Clairtone was my first great love. And you never forget your first love.'"
So begins Clairtone, Ron Mann’s new archival documentary about the rise and fall of the Clairtone Sound Corporation. For a decade, in the 1960s, Clairtone Sound Corporation captured the spirit of the times: sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and liberated. From its modern oiled-walnut and teak stereos to its minimalist logos and promotional materials, Clairtone produced a powerful and enduring body of design work, manufactured in Stellarton, Nova Scotia.
Founded in 1958 by Peter Munk and David Gilmour, Clairtone quickly became known for its iconic designs and masterful advertising campaigns. Its acclaimed Project G stereo, with its space-age styling, epitomized the Swinging Sixties. Famously, Hugh Hefner owned a Project G. So did Frank Sinatra. Oscar Peterson affirmed that his music sounded as good on a G as it did live.
What follows is the stuff of Canadian history, as Munk and Gilmour's one-of-a-kind stylish stereo consoles paired with brand-new modernist advertising techniques allowed the business to soar astronomically. However, that quick ascension was met with a swift downfall. Costs mounted, manufacturing problems persisted, and a heartbreakingly premature gamble on the colour TV industry, left the company nearly bankrupt and forced the two founders to give up control to the Nova Scotia government.
Clairtone remains a design icon to this day, with its most enduring stereo - the Project G - still considered a collector’s item in a class all its own.
Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann is one of Canada's foremost documentary filmmakers. Mann established his international reputation while in his twenties with a series of award-winning theatrical documentaries, including Imagine the Sound (1981), Poetry in Motion (1982), Comic Book Confidential (1988), Twist (1992), and Grass (1999). Ron’s other films include Go Further (2003), Tales of the Rat Fink (2006), Know Your Mushrooms (2008), In the Wake of the Flood (2010), Altman (2014) and Carmine Street Guitars (2018).
In 2002, Ron also founded FILMS WE LIKE, a boutique distributor of documentary, independent and international films in Canada. Beginning with Sam Green and Bill Siegel's The Weather Underground (2002), Films We Like has released over 300 films and counting.
Tickets $12 ($11.40 cash at the door if available)
Punch passes welcome, please email movies@carbonarc.ca to reserve
