Absolutely my favorite film out of this year’s Sundance festival, Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves is boldly experimental, striving to represent what silence and sound mean to deaf people while also testing the limits of what cinema can be.  From 2011 to about 2013, there was a spate of robberies in Southern California, with tubas and other instruments stolen from high school marching bands.  The interesting dilemma this posed—the quite literal absence of a specific sound and the ramifications of that—inspired O’Daniel to make this film.  Identifying as d/Deaf (she wears hearing aids in both ears), she has created a film which perfectly encapsulates the deaf experience and translates it beautifully for a wider audience.  This is a movie which demands to be seen, and which should be required viewing for anyone with a set of eyeballs.

Eschewing a traditional narrative, The Tuba Thieves functions primarily as a collection of vignettes and loose plot threads which don’t necessarily connect to each other but serve the overall theme.  At various points, on-screen intertitles inform the audience of the latest tuba theft.  Occasionally we check-in with marching bands discussing the loss of their equipment. At other points, O’Daniel simply presents the audience with lovely shots of Los Angeles. A helicopter dumping water on a hillside fire.  A mountain lion overlooking the valley. And so on.  The various threads strung throughout the film all explore the nature of sound, and deafness, to some degree.  The closest the film comes to a traditional dramatic narrative is in the subplot involving Nyke (Nyeisha Prince) and Nature Boy (Russell Harvard, who had a memorable turn in the first season of Fargo), two deaf lovers getting ready for the birth of their first child. These scenes ground the movie and its intellectual, almost philosophical themes in relatable, human characters, giving us a glimpse of what it’s like for them to be deaf in a world ruled by sound. The first time we meet Nature Boy, he sits in a soundproof booth repeating back the audiologist’s prompts, becoming increasingly frustrated with the exercise.  (From personal experience, I can attest that this is 100% accurate.) It’s an intimate, empathetic, illuminating view into the mundane struggles of deaf people.

Elsewhere, the movie flits back and forth between seminal events in history that provide interesting interrogations of our relationship to sound.  There’s John Cage’s 1952 performance of 4’33”, a controversial musical piece consisting of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, or what Cage called ‘the absence of intended sounds.’ As people shift uncomfortably in their seats, incredulous at what they’re witnessing, O’Daniel’s camera eventually follows a single audience member who leaves the performance, taking an almost meditative walk into the Woodstock forest. There are also scenes from a 1979 performance at the Deaf Club in San Francisco, headbanging music reverberating throughout the venue as we see deaf people throughout the audience, having intimate conversations in ASL, unfazed by the noise. At other points, the movie refers to Prince’s 1984 performance at Gallaudet University, a college for deaf and hard of hearing students. One of the more interesting plot threads, which expands the film’s scope to discuss the quite literally destructive nature of sound, involves Surfridge, a once-prominent Los Angeles neighborhood.  The filmmaker charts the rise of jet engines in the 1950s and 1960s and the corresponding outflux of residents from Surfridge, who found the increasing ambient decibel level to be unbearable. The subdivision gradually fell into disrepair, ultimately being bulldozed altogether.

Befitting its subject matter, this is by far the most inclusive, accessible movie I’ve ever seen, with the most detailed open captioning ever committed to film (or digital). The open captioning does a masterful job of communicating every sound that is occurring within a scene.  Not only that, it also communicates the quality of the sound, that is, how the sound sounds. Music is described as being vulnerable, sharp, warm, and so on. And this is all accentuated with dynamic animations that adapt to what’s on screen.  When a prolonged tuba sound is heard, the captioning reads, “[A T U B A S T R E T C H E D].” At one point, a gardener operates a loud leaf blower, the on-screen text displaying, “[95 db]” to give viewers a visual representation of the volume.  Other times, the captioning fades in and out of the screen as needed to indicate a sound that is gradually increasing or decreasing.  Combined with the use of different color texts to convey the varied soundscape within a scene, this is beautifully done, and I wish every film had open captions to this degree. 

Even as someone who has amplification, I found this deeply touching because it can be extremely difficult to appreciate certain sounds, or to imagine what they sound like.  For instance, I can more or less distinguish a guitar, from say, a drum set, but if you asked me to describe what the guitar sounds like or what the drums sound like, I wouldn’t be able to, since I lack the vocabulary to do so. (And don’t bother asking me to identify what notes are being played.)  As the cast so beautifully put it during the post-film Q and A, the film really is about “access-ibility”, transcending communication barriers so that everyone can enjoy the film equally, including people who were unaware that certain objects were associated with certain sounds. 

The captioning also takes on a poetic, lyrical bent at times.  My personal favorite is when, as we watch a deaf skateboarder roll through a skate park, the only sound being the mechanical clank and humming of his wheels, the on-screen text reads: “[ocean rhythm of Alex’s wheels].”  Through metaphor, this beautifully conveys what the sound is to audience members who either can’t hear the sound or may not be able to verbalize what they’re able to hear.

The way O’Daniel weaponizes the open captioning, combined with the formless ebb and flow of the ‘narrative,’ add up to a playful deconstruction of cinematic expectations, testing the limits of what defines a ‘feature film.’ Best described as creative nonfiction, the filmmaker blends documentary footage with reenactments to the point that I stopped being able to tell the difference.  Scenes also feature a combination of both professional actors and real-life figures playing themselves, such as Manuel Castaneda, the Centennial High School marching band director.  

Aside from the lack of a cohesive narrative, there are several scenes which play out in unusual ways, frequently breaking the fourth wall.  At one point, a woman signs silently to the camera in black and white. The more she signs, the more it becomes apparent that she’s signing script directions.  The camera then slowly pans up beyond her, over a mountain range, as the film shifts to reveal the scene that she had just been signing. Touches like this help to establish The Tuba Thieves as more of a sensory experience (or, perhaps more accurately, a lack of sensory experience).  The movie is also peppered with wry sight gags that feel vaguely postmodern, particularly the high school ticker signs which feel more like philosophical pronouncements than everyday announcements.  One high school sign drolly reads, “When did you lose your objectivity?”

Though its experimental nature may be a turn-off to some viewers, The Tuba Thieves deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible (I hope to god it finds U.S. distribution).  It does a fantastic job of de-pathologizing the deaf experience, and conveying just how important the dimension of sound is to this population.  Deaf people have a specific culture that’s derived from the way we interact with the world and with each other.  My hope is that anyone who watches this comes away with a newfound, or deeper, appreciation for not only the challenges deaf people face, but also the nuances of sound and communication.  It’s a dimension of our lives that deserves not to be taken for granted.  I know I certainly don’t, and it’s incredibly refreshing and deeply moving to see it reproduced on screen so faithfully. This film demands attention, deepening the ongoing cultural conversation started by recent movies Sound of Metal and CODA, and, with any luck, paving the way for more accessibility measures (open caption everything!).