This engagingly playful Los Angeles-based hybrid feature doc is rendered even more striking with its direction by a d/Deaf director who uses sign language and subtitles astutely and with marked impact. Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves dwells upon a series of mysterious tuba thefts that plagued music schools of Southern California for several years.
The fact that the crimes are so specific is oddball enough, but feature doc debutant O’Daniel cleverly blends doc with fictionalised performances while making the most of a rich soundscape to deal with communication and interpretation, confronting/challenging audiences with the experience of deafness. In The Tuba Thieves silence and sound are key components in creating a unique film experience.
For a number of years a series of California music schools suffered from a plague of mysterious tuba thefts…but rather than heading into a rabbit warren of film noir crime investigation, O’Daniel uses this unlikely crime wave to take a warm-hearted look at the community of d/Deaf people in Los Angeles.
The process allows for an engagingly innovative structure involving smart use of sound, subtitles, sign language and description-captioning (opening scenes feature audio descriptions such as “growl of machinery’ and “loud, rattling engine”) which creates a strangely immersive film experience. Her addition of this extra material enables the audience to engage with the film in unexpected ways.
The film features fictionalised performances by Nyeisha Prince, a Deaf woman playing herself, and Geovanny Marroquin, a drum major of one of the burglarised bands (now sans tuba) as the film charts their lives during the years of the robberies that hit Southern California high schools between 2011 and 2013. But while the thefts are the starting point, the film is really about sound and the cinematic experience.
Visually it is beautifully shot by DOP Derek Howard, but the sound landscape and ingenious use of on-screen sub-titling and description captioning puts it squarely into a categorisation all of its own.
O’Daniel also layers in three historic concerts that highlighted silence – the 1952 premiere of John Cage’s 4′33″, in which a pianist sat at a piano in silence for four minutes and 33 seconds; a punk show at the Deaf Club in San Francisco in 1979 and Prince’s visit to the Deaf University Gallaudet during his 1984 Purple Rain tour in 1984.
US, 2023, 91mins
Dir/scr: Alison O’Daniel
Production: Independent Lens, PBS, Chicken & Egg Pictures
Producers: Alison O’Daniel, Maya E. Rudolph, Rachel Nederveld, Su Kim
Cinematography: Derek Howard
Editors: Alison O’Daniel, Jack Khalil
With: Nyke Prince, Geiovanny, Russell Harvard, Warren “Wawa” Snipe
Sales: Cinephil
