.I.A. is co-sponsoring the amazing Vancouver Sometimes Plays Itself film series that's screening at the Waldorf Hotel! It's the first comprehensive showing of some of the earliest, most ambitious and strangest films shot in Vancouver and it happens every Monday at 7 PM for the next few weeks. The series is presented by local arts researcher Elvy Del Bianco, who has spent the last year and a half identifying and acquiring Vancouver-set films, and will feature notable guest speakers. Michael Turner’s On Location 1 (Elvy Del Bianco’s Annotated Film Collection) will screen weekly before each film, and we're priming it here on the blog by offering Elvy's thoughts on that week's title.
This week's film is Madelaine Is..., and here's the trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtFvOi54GHo
And here's the synopsis and some thoughts from Elvy:
After a dispute with her father, a young Québécois woman (Nicola Lipman) moves to Vancouver. There she navigates creative expression, the fashion world, an egotistical-chauvinist-leftist boyfriend (John Juliani), a proto-nerd possible love interest (Wayne Specht), a slumming physician and a skid road resident while on the winding road to happiness.
In 1971 Madeleine is … was much hyped: the first Canadian feature length film directed by a woman, Sylvia Spring, whose challenges in bringing the film to screen in a male-dominated industry mirrored the tribulations of its lead character, it was anticipated as a female response to Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road (1970). Instead, reviews were poor, business worse and Madeleine is ... all but disappeared.
An undeserved fate. The film suffers some technical and aesthetic limitations –like pretty much every Canadian film of the early ‘70s. However, much of it’s poor reception can be blamed on the director being out of lock-step with the prevailing ideology of feminist and leftist filmmaking practice of the time –apparently she was too independent an independent.
"Spring's film achieves something fairly difficult: it takes people of five varying social types -the confused young girl; the gawky straight young clerk; the power--mad revolutionary; middle-class drop out; and the poor old alcoholic- and never once treats them as stereotypes or without generosity. The camera looks straight at the actors ... with no glamorizing and no distortions." (Take One, May/June 1970, pg. 27). To that no mean feat add an early ‘70s youth culture setting, images of lost Vancouver -including a pre-cobblestone Gastown and the Stanley Park zoo- and expressive camera work.
Madeleine is … Colour, 1971, 89 minutes. Not available on DVD.
Vancouver Sometimes Plays Itself series screens every Monday, Admission is by Donation
7pm—Doors
7:30pm—Introductory Presentation by Special Guest Speaker
7:50pm—Screening
