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Everyone loves a hero. We’re awash with heroic stories in film and TV, decades into the comic-book-turned-movie blockbuster. In fact, we’ve had so many of these stories that there’s a bona fide backlash now, with countless films whose taglines could be “not all heroes wear capes.”’
Now, whether they’re wearing spandex or not, most motion picture heroes are men. The very word “hero” conjures a masculine figure, standing in the Superman position, legs spread, arms akimbo. But of course, heroism in real life looks a lot different, as two documentaries screening at both Sundance and SXSW reinforce.
Created by women, “The Librarians” and “Sally” both depict stunning acts of heroism, personal and political. Their female subjects use their power not to subjugate or even control others, but to do take necessary and important action.
“[‘The Librarians’] follows several librarians across the country fighting against censorship in this movement that is very scary. But they give us hope and they help [us] understand what’s happening,” says editor MarÃa Gabriela Torres. The Gloria Schoemann Editors Fellow spoke on a panel at Sundance about her film and in an exclusive interview with us.
Her documentary outlines the prevalence and impact of book bans in the United States by following the women who refuse to implement them, risking their livelihoods, places in their communities, and safety in the process.
Stacks may seem like an unlikely place for acts of heroism, but “The Librarians” finds a lot of drama there. Director Kim A. Snyder “was very clear that she wanted to build. She didn’t want it to be little vignettes of people,” Torres shares, explaining how the team worked together on the film’s structure so “you get the feeling of build-up to the precipice, which is the final act of the movie, when you’re like: ‘Well, what are we gonna do about this?’”
As such, the documentary feels almost like an action flick, growing the suspense and danger as it goes. The individual librarians take increasingly dangerous stands against a movement that would take away books that feature LGBTQ+ characters and people of color.
In many ways, the librarians seem unlikely heroes. The stereotype of a librarian is a meek woman in glasses, something akin to the right’s named bugaboo of the lonely cat woman. And Snyder, Torres, and team are smart in showing us women who are anything but outside agitators. The film subjects are all white, middle-class women. They’re gun owners, churchgoers, mothers, and veterans who’ve largely grown up in the communities they serve.
But they will not break the librarian credo and help ostracize the vulnerable youth they serve. And by refusing to do so, they’re on the front lines of maintaining our civil society. It’s an unsung type of heroism, but clearly a much-needed one.
In contrast, writer/director Cristina Costantini’s “Sally” features a hero you may have heard of before: Sally Ride, the first American woman to go into space. In a one-on-one interview during Sundance, Costantini shared, “I grew up loving Sally Ride, being obsessed with Sally Ride… I even painted this big mural on my elementary school wall of her. When everybody was given the choice to paint their favorite celebrity—and everybody painted like Michael Jordan or Brett Favre from Wisconsin—then there’s Sally Ride in this lineup, which I think is so funny. Everybody had pop stars and athletes, and mine is a historical figure.”
Costantini calls the astronaut a formative symbol for her, someone who made her think that if a “girl can go to space, something that’s so amazingly symbolic—leaving the atmosphere on a flaming rocket ship—if a girl can do that, I can do good, big things too.”
But when Ride died in 2012, Costantini “found out with the rest of the world that she had this female life partner, who had been kept essentially a secret.” And the film features the heroism of Tam O’Shaughnessy almost as much as Ride’s. While noting that Sally “was very brave in some ways,” Costantini points out that her subject was “not quite brave enough to hold hands with Tam in public, even though Tam was that brave.”
“Tam was out before she met Sally and was brave enough to live as an openly queer woman at a time— I mean, we’re still in a time when it’s hard to be an openly queer person in many ways. It could ruin your career. It could be dangerous to be gay. And Tam was open and very brave,” she adds.
As such, the film is an exploration of different types of feminine courage, deconstructing how we define heroism. Here Ride is, chasing this big, previously male achievement—and Costantini assembles her film so we feel like we’re with Ride on the rocket, in mission control, echoing the traditional beats of great-men movies.
But Costantini also complicates Ride, showing her flaws. “You want a story of the first woman to be a woman who was uplifting and supporting other women at the same time. But that simply wasn’t what was happening,” Costantini shares. Ride was “incredibly competitive, which is probably what got her to where she wanted to be, but also made her [unable to become friends with] the women that she was competing with.” As such “Sally” could be a portrait of a flawed hero who achieves great things.
But then, Costantini goes somewhere else. She makes O’Shaughnessy the true hero of her film, celebrating her more quotidian type of courage—the type of bravery it takes to be yourself when the world, and even those who love you most closely, say there’s something wrong with who you are. That you should hide or change. O’Shaughnessy doesn’t listen to those voices.
And “The Librarians” don’t either. They fight to keep their shelves stocked, despite being called pedophiles and worse.
These are American women fighting—fighting for the right to learn, to achieve, to be themselves. And they’re not trying to control other people or force their worldviews on others. There’s a part in “The Librarians” where a proponent of book bans imagines librarians slinging LGBTQ+ content to kids like aggressive drug dealers.
But, as anyone who’s ever been in a library knows, that’s not what it’s like. The books are there for those who need them and the librarians just want the texts to be discoverable, particularly for people who are isolated because of their identities. “The Librarians” know that “books save lives,” and they repeat it often.
The freedom to learn, to read, is one of our most fundamental rights. As is the freedom to love and achieve. The women in these documentaries—and the women who made them—just want to be able to do their jobs, to be who they are, to live unencumbered.
And they want that not just for themselves, but for their entire communities too. Costantini notes that “This love story was not able to be celebrated while Sally was alive, but NASA has hosted Bear [Sally’s lesbian sister] and Tam as special guests from their LGBT affinity group. The fact that that is how far we’ve come is exciting, but I think it’s a reminder [that] there’s a lot of work to do, and the fight is not over.”
Thankfully, there are women like the subjects of “The Librarians” and Tam O’Shaughnessy who will not stop fighting for us. And they represent a type of heroism we need more of, on-screen and in real life: a feminine, quiet type of heroism that will not quit.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/I8nev5H
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