A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN EDITION
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2019
Girl Power Film + Media Summit BY DANIELLE ACTON
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he work I saw was crafted with time and effort and filled more than just quotas. They were filling us with inspiration for a future in which female-identifying filmmakers are seen as equally important to our male counterparts in the film industry. And that is the power in attending the 2019 Girl Power Film + Media Summit. As a college student, you don’t get many opportunities to network outside of your own classmates, and while my classmates at Columbia College Chicago are amazing creators in their own right, it can feel suffocating. I’m on the cusp of graduation, which is why working for Cinema Femme has been so liberating to me in terms of networking opportunities. This past winter, I was brought in as a marketing coordinator for the team, and one of the first companies I reached out to was Imagine This Productions through their support for The Light Leaks, who I’ve worked with before. We were invited by founders Susie Francois and Patrice Francois to be a partner for the 2019 Girl Power Film + Media Summit in Brooklyn, and the summit blew me away. As a student in Chicago I can feel limited to just Chicago creators, but stepping into New York to discuss women in film with an international group of people was refreshing. This experience allowed me to connect and talk about not only my work for the magazine, in terms of us looking for future interviews, advertising, and collaboration opportunities, but also my work as a student studying television. I was able to speak with other college filmmakers and even see their screened work. I also spoke to industry professionals who are building a place for themselves in a male-dominated field, and it could not be more inspiring. I went in feeling like a shy college student who was out of their element and I came out feeling empowered and in my right place. Sometimes it can feel as if imposter syndrome sneaks up on you fast in this line of work, and being reaffirmed that you have a voice that can make waves with what you do is important. I can recall tangible moments in my career where I’ve felt like my work was a waste, but my work with Cinema Femme has shown me that even the smallest of connections can make a 14
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difference. If I hadn’t sent a simple email, then I would have never found this beautiful opportunity. No matter the amount of work you do, it is still valuable to this industry as we move forward with empowering women directors. I think that is what I learned the most during my time in New York as I saw each woman around me sharing her experience and her work from international places. The allyship of sisterhood is such a strong connection that we at Cinema Femme are proud to uphold so that female-identifying filmmakers have a place within our society that has previously swept them under the rug. Our voices ring out louder when we support each other, and I know as I move forward in my career it will not be without women at the helm bolstering us up. You can feel as if you’re not fulfilling your full creative potential, and then be sparked into coming to the understanding that your mere contributions are part of the process in which you come to your creativity, and that constant creation does not define a creator. The work I saw was crafted with time and effort and filled more than just quotas. They were filling us with inspiration for a future in which female-identifying filmmakers are seen as equally important to our male counterparts in the film industry. And that is the power in attending the 2019 Girl Power Film + Media Summit. ■
Photo credit: Millie Gillana
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A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN The Hero is the Sidekick BY JAYLAN SALAH
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n patriarchal societies, sisterhood is treated as an unannounced competition: One will always be prettier, more successful, wealthier, marry the better guy, and have the more picture-perfect family. And sisters pose an infinite source of entertainment for judgmental aunts and uncles—even parents! In “A League of Their Own” (1992), the late Penny Marshall uses baseball, a very American, very masculine sport, to pit two sisters against each other, testing their love, loyalty, and how they sometimes stand in the way of feminine independence. Many films have covered the sister-sister relationship, specifically the inferiority/superiority complex that emerges from one sister being more successful than the other. Some more notable examples include: • •
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“Vox Lux” (2018), directed by Brady Corbet. “In Her Shoes” (2005), directed by Curtis Hanson, which pits the stereotypical archetype of a successful, physically unappealing woman versus her gorgeous, brainless younger sister. “Proof” (2005), directed by John Madden, which is about a blond protégé who shares her father’s brains and mental illness and is completely manipulated by her older, white-collar sister. And “America’s Sweethearts” (2001), directed by Joe Roth. The younger, nerdy sister is subservient to her gorgeous, older megastar sister, yet secretly falls in love with her estranged husband.
Most of the films about sister-sister relationships were created, directed, and written by men. Beauty was an integral factor in the feminine rivalry archnemesis, and so was career status. However, the main cause for sibling rivalry in most movies involves, sadly, a man. Two sisters would destroy each other’s lives for the sake of a trophy at the end of the movie, which usually refers to a man. Rarely did we get a glimpse into a complex relationship where love—alongside a bigger passion other than beauty and sex appeal—played a part in defining societal and gender roles, with respect to the sister-sister bond. Marshall’s film “A League of Their Own” pays homage to how many women are given the unfair burden of choosing either domesticity or worldliness. In her portrayal of Dottie and Kit’s characters, Marshall shows a complex case of how reality works for women. The more talented Dottie is also prettier yet underestimates herself; even when she is given the chance to join a league of women who share the same capabilities, she denies it, satisfied with a life of docile compliance that her parents and husband expect. Her sister, Kit, is the polar opposite. She is a minority in being subsidiary to her older sister. Within her sheltered community, she is usually dismissed as less beautiful and less talented. Yet her passion and motivation are bigger than those of Dottie’s and this motivation is what pulls them both forward to join the league. Both women are taken out of their natural habitat. Thrown into the field, they both transform into different characters. The love that was seemingly eternal between them turns into several conflicts. They become rivals and Kit is transferred to another team, only for the sibling rivalry to soar. There is no denial that Kit and Dottie love each other, but the unequal opportunities and circumstances handed to both make it difficult for Kit to overcome her inadequacies with respect to Dottie’s better chances at being an accepted, desirable woman in her society. Dottie represents the trope most of us feel inferior to: she has perfected the daughter role, the wife role, and the societal role. Kit, on the other hand, is always scrutinized for being un-Dottie-like. Despite having never been granted an equal opportunity to express and represent herself as her sister, Kit has finally found her calling through baseball. Joining the Rockford Peaches offers Kit an equal opportunity of representation in a major systemic, if not holistically neutral, way. That’s when Dottie and Kit are treated equally; despite the grading system of beautification of women, their skills on the field are what make them distinct. This results in elevating Kit to a pedestal facing her more talented sister, where she makes up for what she lacks in talent through passion, enthusiasm, and motivation.
lationship is built, to be replaced by constructive competitive sports. In “A League of Their Own,” women make major decisions, even wrong ones. When Jimmy is too hungover to take over his role in terms of creating a lineup, Dottie takes charge. She’s a natural-born leader, yet her submission to a life of domesticity offers her a backdoor to “willingly” abandon her ambition and authoritative persona to become a doting housewife. This is what patriarchy does to women. Not only do women who lack the same luster of beauty, power, race, or social status suffer, but those who conform to the patriarchal grading system of being on top because of their looks or superior house management skills suffer the most. A woman with the strength of character and talent like Dottie abandons her ability to shine on the field, stating that she won’t miss “putting on all the gear, catching a double header in 100-degree heat, pushing the bus through mud, getting slammed into every other day by a base runner.” Dottie is manipulated by the patriarchy into believing that her life on the field is the cause of her agony, of her physical exertion and her pain, while her domestic existence would not cause her any further harm. Patriarchy promises women the lure of a safe, sheltered life within the corners of their homes, blissfully baking, enjoying sex every afternoon, looking after tired husbands, and giving their full focus to children. Only for these women to discover that they have been handed a sugarcoated lie wrapped in tears and disappointments and inadequacy with a full-time working husband. Women have always been assigned roles based on their race, looks, social status, and place on the sexualization meter. Despite being unsexualized herself, loving wife Dottie is usually eyed by the men in “A League of Their Own” as an object of desire. In a scene, Ernie Capadino appraises Kit by moving his hand along her arm, as if weighing meat for the next meal. When she gets his approval, she is still asked to bring in her more talented, “hotter” sister. Throughout “A League of Their Own,” I envisioned that I would come out of the experience rooting for Dottie or the sexually provocative “All the Way” Mae, probably due to my infatuation with Madonna previously in “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985). Art works in mysterious ways. I rooted for Kit, and even though I realized I really wanted the sisters to make up at the end, Marshall gave me that underdog I could not take my eyes off, one I would cheer for till the end credits. On this rare occasion, this underdog is a woman! ■
As sibling rivalry intensifies, Dottie and Kit find themselves on opposing sides; they drift apart since their competition takes a “healthier” turn as opposed to the crooked surface on which they were compared previously. Gone are the self-promotion and competitor derogation innuendos on which Dottie and Kit’s reCINEMA FEMME MAGAZINE
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TWO SETS OF RULES BY AMY RENEE WASNEY
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hen men participate, it’s an event. When women participate, it’s a show. In video games, male characters wear full suits of armor; female characters wear metal bikinis. In comic books and superhero movies, men wear tactical suits and are featured in fight scenes; women wear outfits designed to show off their breasts and are featured posing in impossible yoga positions. In sports, boys play the game; girls play the game too but they have to do it while wearing a skirt and looking pretty. It doesn’t seem to matter what the actual activity is—there seems to always be a double standard when it comes to men’s and women’s activities. In “A League of Their Own” (1992), those double standards are everywhere. Women were not even allowed to come and try out unless Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz) decided they looked attractive enough. Once they had been deemed attractive enough to play baseball and they made it through the tryouts, they were then shown their new uniform—a dress—and told that in order to play in the league, they would have to attend charm school. The list of double standards is ever growing, and the women haven’t even played their first game. The double standards regarding appearance are the big thing we see before the season gets underway, but once the women are actually playing baseball, that’s when even more signs of sexist double standards start popping up at every turn, creating unforeseen obstacles for the women who just wanted to play baseball. As the first season of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) progresses, the Rockford Peaches face challenges from all angles. They spend a number of games playing without a coach while the man who is supposed to be coaching them sits in the corner, drunk and grumbling about “I don’t have ballplayers, I’ve got girls.” One player, Evelyn, gets told by her husband that he will not take care of his own son while she is playing baseball, and so she has no choice but to bring the child along with the team. When they’re on the field playing, they’re getting mocked from the sidelines by men hiking their pants up to mimic the dresses. And early on in the season, they’re told that the owners do not want to continue on with the league past one year because the men will be home soon and having both a men’s and a women’s professional baseball league is just not in the country’s interest. All they’re trying to do is play professional baseball in the same way that the men do, and all they’re met with is hurdles and ridicule. The film takes place in 1943, but here it is in 2019 and we are still facing the same issues when it comes to females in sports. Growing up, I spent most of my time playing some sport or other, and early on I started to notice the ways that my girls’ teams were treated differently than the boys’ teams. The boys
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went by “Mascot Name,” and the girls went by “Lady Mascot Name.” Even if the mascot wasn’t something that could be a gender, they still had to find a way to make it absolutely sure that everyone knew it was girls playing. In middle school, all the competing schools came together and decided that the weekly Tuesday night games ran too late into the evening and interfered with the children getting a proper night sleep in the middle of the week. The boys’ games during the winter season were moved to Friday night with the added bonus of being an exciting start to the weekend for the whole family. The girls’ games during the fall season were moved to immediately after school on Tuesday so that they wouldn’t be out so late on a school night. Of course, they were now so early that any parents working a traditional 9 to 5 job could no longer attend and support their children. High school was no different. The boys’ teams got pep rallies and morning announcements and features in the local newspapers. We girls got repeatedly asked, “When does your season start?” despite being already halfway through it. If we wanted to do any weight training or cardio exercise, we had to make sure that it wasn’t when the boys’ team was in there. If there happened to be a pep rally the same day as we had a game, then that game was mentioned as an afterthought. Our high school was built before female students played sports, and so it was built with a baseball field on campus for the boys to play on. The girls’ softball team, on the other hand, had to drive to a field halfway across town for practice and games, a field where most of the school didn’t even know where it was and if they didn’t have a car, they weren’t going anyway. The hurdles and double standards are not just showing up in films and my own personal experiences. Just as we saw in the “A League of Their Own,” it is not uncommon for sports announcers to refer to female athletes’ marital status as opposed to talking about their skills or accomplishments in the game. Along with their marital status, their physical appearance is also talked about much more frequently than any athletic ability. The most popular and most recognized female athletes are almost always the ones that are more conventionally attractive while the most talented athletes often get overlooked. You might say that while the way female athletes are talked about and viewed is not ideal, it’s certainly not enough of an issue to get so worked up about. If these attitudes didn’t have real-world consequences, you may be right, but the consequences are there. The average salary for a professional male athlete is in the millions while professional female athletes might struggle to even make six figures. NBA players can earn millions just from sponsorship deals, while many WNBA players have to spend the off-season playing in other countries as a second job to make ends meet. The MLB is a multibillion-dollar
industry to this day, while the AAGPBL only lasted eleven years before it was shut down.
taking female athletes seriously, these women are getting written off, ridiculed, ignored, cast aside, and have to work twice as hard for less than half the reward. â–
The gender double standards in professional sports have real and lasting effects. From the 1940s to the present day, by not
Illustration by Tavi Veraldi
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Sister-Sister BY ALYSE MCGUIGAN
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iblings can be the most enduring relationships you have in your life. They know you before significant others come along. They know life with your parents and life after your parents die. They know you before major successes and failures. It is for these reasons that the relationship between siblings is emotional and complex. I grew up with an older brother, a younger sister, and a younger brother and know all too well that while siblings know how to raise each other up, we also know how to cut each other deeply where it hurts. In “A League of Their Own” (1992), a sister-sister relationship on full display reveals the ways in which siblings support each other while engaging in competition unimportant to everyone but them. Sisters Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) and Kit Keller (Lori Petty) are two talented baseball players in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Even before their arrival to the league, their relationship is categorized as Dottie being the star and Kit being the one that needs bailing out by her big sister. The first game in the movie finds Kit striking out after swinging at pitches too high for her to hit followed by Dottie batting in the game winning runs. Dottie tried to tell Kit not to swing, but Kit was adamant in proving her sister wrong. We see a similar situation in a second game a bit later. Kit never failed to complain about her dynamic with Dottie, and it is here that I grew more and more frustrated with the character of Kit. Stop blaming your sister for your problems. You’re the one standing in your own way. I realized I identified more with the Dottie character because that’s the position I’m in with my own sister. We are less than two years apart in age and are the two middle children of four. We grew up experiencing life together closely, and since I’m the older sister, I’ve had the benefit of getting to do certain things first and setting the bar. Where did this competition stem from, though? Just as Kit posits in the film, I believe a lot of the comparisons my sister and I make to each other come from our parents and extended family. Humans enjoy grouping like things together so even though my parents compared all four of us to each other, my sister and I were compared more often because we were the girls of the family. We’re all taught during school or in sports that when you perform a certain way it means you are rewarded or given better opportunities, and we’re all used to proximity comparisons: classmates, teammates, and siblings. Yes, I want my sister to succeed, but I also want to be the star. I think this is true for Dottie and Kit. You never want to see your sibling fail at something, but you do want to be better than her, so what happens when your success means your sibling’s failure? The scenes where Kit batted under Dottie’s watchful eye were most telling of a sibling dynamic. We see Kit swing at the high pitches a few times during the movie so it was especially satis22
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fying seeing Dottie try to use that against her in the World Series, tempting her with high pitches so she’d strike out. Others players could have picked up on Kit’s affinity for swinging at the high ones, but the fact that it’s Dottie who suggests those pitches cuts more deeply. She knows her sister’s habit and her stubbornness. Dottie knows Kit wants to prove people wrong and will keep trying and failing to hit the ball since she didn’t have success up to that point. What Dottie doesn’t count on is Kit’s breaking point of being compared to her big sister. She finally hits one of the high ones, causing her to become the star and win the game. The reason she hit the ball was that determination to come out from under the shadow of the older sister, a shadow that she never had to be under in the first place. I rooted against Kit winning that final game because I wanted to win. I couldn’t help it. I needed to root for Dottie to win so that I could win. It’s ingrained in me. Must be better, faster, stronger. If I’m identifying with Dottie, I needed her to win the game against Kit who represents my little sister. Sorry, sis. I didn’t want you to fail, but I wanted to win. Does it really matter that Dottie beat Kit in a race to the farm that started off just as a silly race where one of them started walking faster than the other? No. This moment between two sisters speaks volumes to how unimportant the competition can be from the outside, but when you’re in it, it feels like nothing else matters. Ultimately, it’s not about the results but the experience of getting there. Nobody is around but the two of them during this moment so they’re only competing for each other. They are the only ones who will know the winner and the loser. These little moments add up over a lifetime. Each sibling will secretly keep score and know who’s better at what. Where would Dottie and Kit be without these trivial contests? Maybe they do have some benefit if only to push you a little more than you thought you could handle. I can’t do too many burpees in a row without slowing down, but when I see my sister knocking them out next to me, I find that I can go a little faster for longer than I expected. When Dottie and Kit come together at the Hall of Fame in the end, it’s not about who won or who lost. As the years go on, siblings compare themselves to each other less and less. One of the reasons for this is that when you start to live apart from each other, you realize that competition isn’t important. As siblings age and start engaging in more relationships outside the family, the negatives in the relationship dissipate, and though the closeness may subside, the emotional attachment remains. You know what you’ve been through together and how you got there. From the outside, it may look insignificant, but it was the times you spent racing each other home that added up in the end. ■
Pamela Powell Pamela Powell, a member of the CFCA, BFCA, Rotten Tomatoes, and the WFCC, currently writes for both print and online publications, and cohosts a segment on WCIA-TV and WLRW radio. She attends film festivals around the world, including Sundance, SXSW, and Toronto, seeking new blockbusters and hidden independent gems. Pamela participates in panel discussions and local social impact film series and focuses on female filmmakers.
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