Sylvia Spring (born July 14, 1942) is a Canadian feminist writer, filmmaker and activist. In 1970, she made Madeleine Is ..., the first Canadian English-language feature film directed by a woman. She was a member of the Canadian task force on Sex-Role Stereotyping in the Broadcast Media established in 1979, a founder of MediaWatch Canada and subsequently its National Director, and presented internationally at forums on the portrayal of women in advertising. In 2005, she was named in the Top 100 list of Canada's Most Powerful Women, in the Trailblazers and Trendsetters category.
Early life
Sylvia Spring was born in Galt, Ontario, on 14 July 1942, the second of three children to Daniel Ronald Spring and Shanna Shapiro. She gained a BA(Hons) at the State University of New York, Buffalo, majoring in English literature and drama.
Career
After graduating, Spring wrote poetry and worked in advertising, journalism, radio and television. She conducted radio interviews of the Canadian poet Irving Layton, directed This Land is People, a TV series introducing viewers to up-and-coming Canadians from all walks of life, including Peter Lougheed, Sinclair Stevens and Gustavo da Roza, and co-directed with David Rimmer Know Place, an experimental short documentary about an alternative school.
Madeleine Is ... In 1969, Spring received a $15,000 grant from the Canadian Film Development Corporation, to produce a feature-length film in Canada. She co-wrote and directed the resulting 90 minute film, Madeleine Is ... (1971), a segment of which, released as a short feature under the name Madeleine, won an award at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1970. With a total budget of $100,000, the film was filmed in Vancouver, and starred Vancouver actress Nicola Lipman in the eponymous role of a young aspiring painter from Quebec who moves to Vancouver, where she is involved in an abusive relationship with a political radical and an unfulfilling relationship with a businessman/nerd, before discovering her own identity as an artist. It premiered in April 1971 in Toronto and Montreal, and in May 1971 in Vancouver, but closed in Toronto after just one week. While the film was feted as the "First movie by woman film-maker" (in fact it was the first since Nell Shipman in 1919), reviews were mixed. One reviewer stated that Spring "introduces a character or sets up a mood then doesn't sustain or develop it. The result is a picture of little artistic or entertainment merit, relying on a lot of clichéd outdoor shots to pad a slight story and thin characterisations." When shown at the Edinburgh Festival three years later, a reviewer felt that it "[won] its place merely by a cry of .... militant feminism". On the other hand, one reviewer recognised "the political and psychological naivety, which at times is downright embarrassing" but found that "Nevertheless, the film was better than the response it got. ... Spring's film achieves something fairly difficult: it takes people of five varying social types .... and never once treats them as stereotypes or without generosity. .... There's a straightforward warmth to this film, and it seems to come from its direction". Another reviewer considered the film "over-condemned", with "tender silly scene[s], amusing and touching"; "by the end of the delightful film I only wished that Spring hadn't bitten off so much for this first feature."
From the early 2000s, critics brought a new perspective to Madeleine Is ..., with one stating that "Spring's film has a few very powerful moments ... and some strikingly expressionistic shots of downtown Vancouver. But regardless of its uneven technical and artistic quality, I would argue that the indifference from which the film has suffered results mainly from two factors: its politics and its style." Another believes that it "should also be recognized as one of the best documents of Vancouver in the history of fiction film, unusually sophisticated in dealing with urban issues as pertinent today as they were in the 1970s."