A segment of a stop-motion animation documentary was recently filmed at the Waitsfield Gallery and Studio FireFolk Arts. The film tells the story of Jane Rubel, an athlete who filed suit against her rural Iowa high school’s athletic union in 1970 after she was stripped of the right to continue playing on the girls’ basketball team because she had married and had a child.
Warren resident Hayley Morris is the film’s supervising animator. “The Baby Didn’t Block Her Jumpshot” was written and directed by New York resident Emily Lobsenz.
Morris specializes in stop-motion animation, a style of animation in which an artist moves small 3D puppets and other objects in tiny increments, taking about 24 digital photographs of their movements per second of film.
Lobsenz said Morris, who choreographed paper replicas of people in the film to animate historical events and experiences, had a talent for “putting emotion into paper.”
“It was incredible to see how Haley could manipulate a prop made of wire and photographs. It felt like the puppet was actually winking at you,” Lobsenz said.
ALL-WOMEN TEAM
Morris said it was fulfilling to work with an all-female team on a film about women’s rights.
Lobsenz came up with the idea for the film two years ago while reading about the history of women’s basketball – specifically how high school girls in Iowa captivated fans with their six-on-six basketball games between the 1950s and 1970s. Their state tournaments in Des Moines drew 70,000 spectators and were covered by Sports Illustrated and the New York Times.
In this story Lobsenz found Rubel’s story.
Rubel (born Jane Christoffer) averaged about 40 points per game for her high school team in Ruthven, Iowa – a town of just over 700 people. In 1970, during her penultimate year of high school, she became pregnant and was expelled from the league because married women and mothers were prohibited from playing.
Rubel sued the school, and in her senior year the American Civil Liberties Union argued her case in federal court, winning the right to play again and demanding that the league change its policies.
Lobsenz said that while some have argued that the leagues’ policies may have been put in place to protect women, she believes they amount to “arbitrary policing of the female body.” At the time, abortion was still restricted and birth control was not widely available in rural towns. It was not uncommon for teenage girls to become pregnant, only to be ostracized by their communities and experience great shame.
When the ACLU won Rubel’s case in 1971, it was “a very important moment in the history of feminism,” she said.
CREATE MAP
For the film, Lobsenz researched historical material such as photos, newspaper articles and film reels that documented the mid-20th century.th-Century girls basketball in Iowa, but her search yielded limited results.
“That’s always the case with women’s stories,” Lobsenz said. “I basically asked people to dig in their basements, or I did it for them.”
The search uncovered an 8mm film reel of a game Rubel played in. Lobsenz also found 16mm reels that the Iowa Girls League shot for national television broadcast, which the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa Library are currently helping to digitize.
There have also been informal, independent archivists who have helped reconstruct the past, Lobsenz said – “people who have held on to things,” such as Sandy Dvorsky, a Ruthven resident who had heard about the film project and worked to create a map of old downtown Ruthven.
In addition to the historical materials, the film includes interviews with women who played high school basketball in Iowa in the 1950s and ’60s – including one with Rubel herself – as well as animated sequences that support the narrative.
“Animation lends itself very well to documentaries,” Morris said. “It can fill in gaps in the narrative that you can’t always fill with live action and interviews.”
Over the last 10 days, a small team at FireFolk Arts has been filming three minutes of stop motion animation. They are currently finishing their work.
REPRODUCTION OF THE CITY CENTER
Maya Erdelyi, who teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and her assistants built two sets for the cartoon, including a replica of downtown Ruthven with small buildings, cars and other props such as tiny newspapers.
In an animated scene in the film, residents of Ruthven are gathered in the bar where Rubel works, reading headlines about the lawsuit she filed.
It was Morris’ idea to shoot in The Valley. Erdelyi said Morris lured the team with photos of beautiful landscapes and epic swimming spots.
Morris moved to the Valley about three years ago after the birth of her daughter. Before that, she lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where she taught animation at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
While pursuing her bachelor’s degree at RISD about 16 years ago, she fell in love with stop-motion animation – a practice that is “handmade and tactile and involves sculpture, painting, drawing, lighting, music and sound design – everything. It’s a medium that combines everything I love about art into one project.”
Lobsenz said it was important to tell Rubel’s story in the context of ongoing gender inequality. She reflected on the film industry – how female directors still earn less than men and have more to prove themselves. She also said it’s difficult to put strong female leads in films because industry leaders argue that women’s stories don’t sell.
“I love these stories about misunderstood people who have been devalued,” said Lobsenz, pointing to her film about Rubel. “But the reality is that it is still very difficult to tell women’s stories.”
