A segment of a documentary film utilizing stop-motion animation was recently shot at Waitsfield gallery and studio space FireFolk Arts. The film features the story of Jane Rubel – an athlete who filed a lawsuit against the athletic union of her rural Iowa high school in 1970 after she was denied the right to continue playing on the girls’ basketball team because she got married and had a child.
Warren resident Hayley Morris is the lead animator on the film. “The Baby Didn’t Block Her Jumpshot” is written and directed by New York City-based Emily Lobsenz.
Morris specializes in stop-motion animation – a form of animation where an artist moves small 3D puppets and other objects around in tiny increments, taking about 24 digital photos of their movements for every one second of film.
Lobsenz said that Morris, who choreographed paper replicas of people to animate historical events and experiences in the film, has a talent for “making paper emotional.”
“It was incredible to see how Haley can manipulate a prop made out of wire and photographs. You feel like the puppet is actually winking at you,” Lobsenz said.
ALL WOMAN TEAM
Morris said it’s been fulfilling to work with an all-woman team on a film about women’s rights.
Lobsenz got the idea for the film two years ago when she was reading about the history of women’s basketball – specifically how high school girls in Iowa were mesmerizing fans with their six-on-six basketball games between the 1950s and 70s. Their state tournaments in Des Moines drew in 70,000 people, with coverage from Sports Illustrated and The New York Times.
Within that history, Lobsenz found Rubel’s story.
Rubel (born Jane Christoffer) averaged around 40 points per game for her high school team in Ruthven, Iowa – a town with a population of just over 700. In 1970, she became pregnant in her junior year and was cast out the league, which had policies prohibiting married women and mothers from playing.
Rubel sued the school, and during her senior year, the American Civil Liberties Union fought her case in federal court. She won the right to play again, and demanded that the league change its policies.
Lobsenz said that while some have argued that the leagues’ policies may have been in place to protect women, to her it reads as an “arbitrary policing of women’s bodies.” At the time, abortion was still restricted and birth control was not prevalent in rural towns. It wasn’t uncommon for teenage girls to become pregnant, only to be ostracized by their communities and experience a great amount of shame.
When the ACLU won Rubel’s case in 1971, it was “a very important time in feminist history,” she said.
CREATE A MAP
Lobsenz’s research for the film had her searching for historical materials like photographs, news articles and film reels documenting mid-20th-century girls’ basketball in Iowa, but her search yielded limited results.
“This is always the case with women’s histories,” Lobsenz said. “I was basically asking people to dig through their basements, or doing it for them.”
That yielded an 8mm film reel of a game that Rubel played in. Lobsenz also found 16mm reels that the Iowa girl’s league made for national TV broadcast, which the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries is currently helping to digitize.
There were also informal, independent archivists who helped to reconstruct the past, Lobsenz said – “people who held onto things,” like Ruthven resident Sandy Dvorsky, who heard about the film project and worked to create a map of the old Ruthven downtown area.
In addition to historical materials, the film contains interviews with women who played high school basketball in Iowa in the 1950s and 60s – including one with Rubel herself, and bits of animation to aid with storytelling.
“Animation lends itself so well to documentary films,” Morris said. “It can fill in gaps in storytelling that you can’t always fill with live action and interviews.”
In the past 10 days or so, a small team shot three minutes of stop-motion animation at FireFolk Arts. They are currently wrapping up their work.
DOWNTOWN REPLICA
Maya Erdelyi, who teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, worked with assistants to build two sets for the animation, including a replica of downtown Ruthven with small buildings, cars, and other props like tiny newspapers.
In one animated scene of the film, Ruthven residents are gathered in a diner where Rubel works, reading news headlines about the lawsuit she filed.
It was Morris’ idea to shoot in The Valley. Erdelyi said that Morris enticed the team with photos of beautiful landscapes and epic swimming spots.
Morris moved to The Valley about three years ago after having her daughter. She previously lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where she taught animation at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
While she was earning her bachelor’s degree from RISD about 16 years ago, she fell in love with stop-motion animation – a practice that’s “handmade, and tactile, and involves sculpting, and painting, and drawing, and lighting, and music, and sound design – everything. It’s a medium that brings everything I love about art into one project.”
Lobsenz said that telling Rubel’s story is important in the context of persistent gender inequality. She reflected on the film industry – how women directors still make less than men and have to prove themselves more. She also said it’s difficult to include strong female leads in films because industry heads argue that women’s stories don’t sell.
“I love these stories about unrecognized people who have been discounted,” Lobsenz said, gesturing to her film about Rubel. “But, the reality is that women’s stories are still really hard to tell.”
