An experimental film that asks us to listen in a new way, d/Deaf director Alison O’Daniel uses captions as a third narrative space. We break down THE TUBA THIEVES in this episode where making sense of the film is the film.
Sundance 2023 Section: NEXT
Distribution: PBS Independent Lens on May 24, 2024
From Sundance’s website: A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
Blending documentary and fictionalized performances by Nyke, a Deaf woman playing herself, and Geovanny, a drum major of a burglarized, now-tubaless band, the film documents their lives during the years of the robberies. Against a backdrop of Los Angeles never quite seen — or heard, rather — quite like this, the main character is sound and lack thereof. A finely tuned sense of silence and sound — aural and conceptual — are collaged to create this utterly singular sonic and cinematic experience.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.498] Kent Bye: Hello, this is Kent Bye. And Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down. We're continuing on our series of looking at Sundance 2023 and the many documentaries that we had a chance to see. Today, we're going to be focusing on a film called The Tuba Thieves, which is a very unique film that we'll be unpacking to a certain degree. Although there's a certain amount of mystery in this film that I think is left up to the viewer to unpack it. But just to set a bit of context, Sundance has a number of different categories. There's doc premieres, there's competition for both U.S. documentaries and world documentaries, and they have all these other categories like the spotlight, and this particular one is under the next category. And the next category is described by Sundance as pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling. Digital technology paired with unfettered creativity promises that film in this selection will shape a greater next wave in American cinema. So it's a bit of a fusion of nonfiction and fiction, but also it's by a deaf filmmaker named Allison O'Daniel, who she grew up wearing a hearing aid, but she grew up with a hearing family. who was in a hearing culture. And so all those experiences informed her of what she describes as this third narrative space with captions. You have the visuals, you have the sound, but the captions are something that you actually introduced me to watching streaming video content. And I never used to have captions turned on, but I've actually learned to love reading captions. And this film in particular, I think is doing a lot of really interesting things with innovating how to use captions and as a deaf filmmaker, Alison O'Daniel is really pushing forth this new cinematic language that I think is really quite interesting. So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your initial thoughts on this.
[00:02:04.268] Wonder Bright: Well, first of all, I should say that, like, I am typically not drawn towards any film that is described as experimental. I went to arts college and I feel like my tolerance was tapped from that experience somehow. I realize as I was watching this film, I'm also drawn to films that have, like, sort of a more traditional classic narrative arc. typically, right? And having said that, I was so delighted by this film. And I think the reason for it is that there was never a moment in the watching of this film where I had any doubts as to the clarity and intention of the filmmaker. So perhaps I've done a disservice to experimental films in the past because I just don't feel that intent coming through diffuse nonlinear narratives. This film could be described as diffuse and nonlinear. But the intentionality behind the filmmaker's positioning just cannot be questioned. I felt so much trust for her choices, such that even when I was completely confused, didn't know what was happening, I enjoyed the experience because it wasn't just that she was intentional. It's that, you know, in the synopsis for the film, they talk about how this is a film about listening. And you do have to listen and you have to listen often from a watching point of view, because sometimes the sound doesn't correlate with the captions. And there's all kinds of things that occur where the listening ends up being not just something that you do with your ears. It's another dimension of listening. It's an experience of attentiveness. And the reason it works in this film is because the filmmaker is attentive. So the experience of listening or absorbing or experiencing this film It kept my attention because she was attending, because everybody in the film is attending to what is occurring. And so even when the attention is diffuse or there are multiple things going on, I was always fascinated. Also, there were so many jokes. And sometimes I knew that it was a joke and I didn't get it. And sometimes I got it. There were just silly jokes in the captions around, you know, indistinct. Like, what was that?
[00:04:56.674] Kent Bye: There was a moment when you have two people who are using American Sign Language on the edge of a cliff and you're far away. and their signing is occluded. And so a little caption that said, indistinguishable chatter. So it's basically this idea that when you're trying to transcribe dialogue, you have some words that are indistinguishable. So there's a bit of like using this indistinguishable mode of describing what was happening. And I just want to also throw out the use of captions in a spatial context. Normally the captions are in the very bottom of the screen. and what they usually call the lower third. But this time the captions were kind of like spread out across the screen, but also multiple captions at once, you know, describing the sounds that you're hearing, but also the sounds are muffled and muddled in a way that you almost need to rely upon the captions in order to really understand what's being said, because the filmmaker is like ducking down the audio and through this low pass filter where it's just you can't hear the full spectrum of the human voice as it's speaking. And so there's a lot of really bold sonic explorations in this film, I'd say, that is trying to recreate the experience that she has as she's watching films where you do have these gaps and these misunderstandings and she describes it in the synopsis as this telephone game where there's like a series of moments of information that's trying to be communicated, but with different types of disconnects and gaps and you kind of create this confusion. So there is this underlying confusion that happens in this film. So it almost feels like a mystery in that sense that you're trying to figure out what the narrative actually is. And I think she actually says that explicitly in the synopsis. There's one sentence that says, making sense of the film is the film. So there's this like sense-making process of like really focusing on that understanding process of the viewer that becomes a part of the experience that she's trying to create in the context of this film.
[00:06:56.661] Wonder Bright: Yeah. Yeah. And I think they've captured it there. Making sense of the film is the sense of the film. There is this experience while watching it where you're piecing together meaning And I never was really sure that I was piecing together the meaning that the filmmaker necessarily intended to me to get. And yet at the same time, I was sure that that was the meaning she intended me to get, because there is a way in which she invites us into the experience of living outside a world that is operating under conditions that you can't take part in. And the way in which she does it is not only deft and intentional, but is also really loving. The quality of her attention is so interested in the things that she's asking us to look at and observe and hear and record. And it's that loving quality of the film that had me so enraptured by it. Because you ultimately can't be sure that the meaning you're carrying away from it is anything that anyone else is going to carry away from it. And yet it feels like a very valid experience because it's yours. Because you're piecing it together in this kind of like little detective experience. And honestly in some ways I feel like because so much of the film relies on words or the misapprehension of words or communication or speech. People are signing, they are speaking, they're using hearing aids, they're interpreting the world around them in a variety of ways. And so ultimately, you're forced to make meaning out of it absent of the meaning being given to you. And so this is, I think, why you arrive at this experience of like having created your own meaning in the piece and your own relationship to it. And like, I'm saying all of this, I'm using all these words to describe it. And really, it was an experience. It's just almost in some ways like I'm loving talking about I'm loving having the opportunity to share what happened to me when I was watching it. And simultaneously, it feels like it's almost a disservice because I really just want other people to have their own experience of it. And that loving quality that O'Daniel has and the attention that she's paying is just a very affirming and curious experience.
[00:09:51.085] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that for me, as I watch a lot of different films, especially within the virtual reality community and immersive storytelling, you watch a piece and then either the piece stands on its own or there's sometimes a gap between what you're taking away and what the intent is. And I feel like this is a type of piece that is kind of almost designed to have that gap. It's like deliberately obscured and occluded in different ways that were very deliberate in the way that the filmmaker was constructing it. I wanted to read just the log line because we haven't really talked about the essence of what the tuba thieves even means. From 2011 to 2013, tubas were stolen from Los Angeles high schools. This is not a story about thieves or missing tubas. Instead, it asks what it means to listen. So I think these stolen tubas were a provocation to imagine what the band would sound like without the tuba, without that low frequency and what were the students doing and also different moments of deaf cultural history of how the relationship to music, whether it's from John Cage piece or from a punk band or from a surprise Prince concert at Gallaudet College, which is a deaf college where Prince made an appearance and gave a concert. You have these other cultural landmarks that happen within the context of the deaf community in relationship to music and sound and vibrations, and those are kind of woven in there. You know, there's a whole other layer of a protagonist and other stories that are almost like associative links that you're kind of following through these situations, but it's not exactly clear what ties them all together. Until maybe the end, you kind of understand more of their relationships and how they're related to each other. But Making sense of the film is the film. I think that's probably a good encapsulation for what the artist was trying to do and what the experience was. But for me, I'm taking away this experience of this different sonic exploration and to rely upon the captions in a new way, but also how they're spatialized. what they're actually saying. Because one of the things that O'Daniel is saying in her synopsis and statement is that a lot of times when people are writing those captions, they're kind of imagining things that people who are deaf or hard of hearing might want, but she's taking it to a whole other layer that she is describing as this third narrative space. And I think that's really actually quite interesting because if you think about how quickly you can read a caption, Then you have this whole other mental layer of being able to read and interpret and analyze. I think she's starting to break out of the constraints of the ways that we've seen the captions in a certain location and with open captions, meaning that the captions are embedded into the piece. Then what are the different ways that you can start to add multiple layers on top of the story? This is in some ways her trying to communicate the way that she experiences films and trying to maybe replicate some of those confusions that she has, but also really embodying the things that she wants to see in the future of captions. So if we have this as the next category, looking at films in the selection or having embedded within it the promises that this is going to shape a greater next wave in American cinema. So Yeah, I would love to see more adoption and experimentation with what can you start to do with this third narrative space, but also continue to push forward not in just solely this experimental context, which my take on this experimental genre is that most of the times when you know what the genre is, have a certain expectation for how the structure is going to be. So you have a little bit of the audience knowing how things are going to be communicated. But in an experimental context, it's defying what your expectations are. It's taking you in a new direction and trying to push forward into things that you are not quite familiar with. And so I really appreciated how this film is starting to push those boundaries. And I'm excited to see where this may catalyze other ideas to start to push forward this third narrative space.
[00:13:55.073] Wonder Bright: Something comes up for me as you're talking about the way that she used captions is a connection to visual artists like Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer, who made a lot of use of using text in their art. And Kruger especially does it in the sense of drawing parallels to advertising, so that there's this idea that the text itself operates as a framework through which you understand what you're looking at visually. And the way that Daniels did this in The Tube of Thieves disrupts that sense of the narrative that we assume is happening because She isn't advertising the thing that is necessarily occurring on the screen. And sometimes the captions, they're asking you to pay attention to something that you weren't paying attention to that might contradict what events are occurring. And so there's this way in which she's using the text to disrupt the frame as much as create the frame, which I just found really fascinating because there's just so much tied up in the way that we use language, which of course is a large part of the point because the written English or other written languages have a completely different I mean, I don't speak ASL, American Sign Language, or any sign language. So I don't have that embodied experience of using my body to communicate in that way. So it was interesting the way that she was not only reframing the story, but she was reframing language in some really profound ways that had me questioning how I was using language to frame what I might be looking at.
[00:15:58.205] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was just reading through their press release talking about ASL as a visual natural language complete with its own grammar and syntax rules. I want to send you a clip from the filmmaker's statement because there's something else that I want to elaborate because if people end up watching this, they may not have access to some of the puzzle pieces to help unlock this. And I think at this point, This is a type of film that as you listen to this discussion, there obviously could be spoilers. So this is the type of film that almost is better to walk into it knowing very little about, but I wanted to just send you this and have you read it and talk about one other point that's brought up in terms of the politics of sound and who's obligated to listen to different sounds or not.
[00:16:45.122] Wonder Bright: Ultimately, this film is a meditation on access and loss, and an investigation into what it means to steal, make, lose, own, protest against, and legislate sound, and therefore, inversely, quiet and peace. The history of sound segregations is deeply embedded into the city through the design and mediation of sound. These choices declare an ownership over space and air, how sound travels through these substrates, and who is allowed or obligated to hear it.
[00:17:18.630] Kent Bye: Yeah, so I think there's a layer that this film is showing who lives over the airport and the sounds, and there's an undertone of the soundscapes of the city, whether it's leaf blowers or other things that you hear woven in and out of this piece, the different types of sounds and who is obligated to hear them. The way that she articulates that is something that I think describes the film that I didn't necessarily get by watching it, but as she articulates it in this way and as I look back on it, it helps me to understand the underlying structure and message that she's talking about, this mediation or access and loss and the different sounds and who is allowed or obligated to hear them.
[00:18:02.319] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I love that, what it means to steal, make, lose, own, protest against, and legislate sound, and therefore inversely quiet and peace. It's this idea of the way that we prioritize sound to communicate language or intent or all kinds of things, and how noisy our world is. Oddly, within like a day or two of having watched The Tube of Thieves, I was reading a subreddit and came across a story that was 10 years old about a man who was deaf or very, very hard of hearing to the point where he may as well have been deaf and he got this miraculous hearing aid and he was able to hear music for the first time. And so he enlisted Reddit's help to find out what music he should listen to. And it's a wonderful story. Look it up. But the reason I'm bringing it up is because he talks about after, you know, like several weeks of entering into this realm of hearing. Some of his favorite parts of the day was just turning the hearing aid off. He said, it's just too noisy out there, you know, and I feel like the tube of thieves, maybe that's part of what allows it to feel so intentional and the quality of listening that comes across because it is actually rather a quiet film. It's very gentle. The soundscapes that are created are extremely gentle. And there are long moments without sound or moments when you're expecting sound and it doesn't occur. And it creates this space for listening because you're not being inundated with things demanding your attention. And in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the intentionality might not be so acute, but in the tube of thieves, it really becomes this meditation. It's not just an invitation to listen. It's a meditation on listening as an experience.
[00:20:30.658] Kent Bye: Yeah, I got that from the piece as well. And this is from the filmmaker that has a bunch of talking points about lowercase D, capital D, deaf and disability talking points, which these are easy reference guidelines and talking points that regarding the terms of use while writing about the two of these. Some of them are courtesy of the National Center on Disability and Journalism, the NCJD. AI Media, Reid Davenport for I Didn't See You There in the National Association on Deafness. And so there's people who are deaf with a lowercase d, which is referring to the physical condition of hearing loss that people identify as deaf with a lowercase d don't always have a strong connection to the capital D Deaf community and don't always use sign language. They may prefer to communicate with speech, and there are a variety of different reasons why a person identifies as Deaf with a lowercase d. For instance, they may have been born to hearing parents and grown up in the hearing world with literal no exposure to the capital D Deaf community. And the uppercase capital D Deaf is used to describe people who identify as culturally deaf and are actively engaged with the deaf community. Deaf with a capital D indicates cultural identity for people with hearing loss who share a common culture and who usually have a shared sign language. There was actually a film at Sundance a number of years ago, like 2000, that was about putting these cochlear implants into children and how some parents didn't want to have their children have these because they wanted to preserve this cultural identity of the Deaf community. And so I think there's this other thing that I wanted to have you read from this press release, because I think it also speaks to another aspect of the language that we have. You know, there's some people within the disability community that are pushing against this able-bodied language, and I wanted to have you read this.
[00:22:22.167] Wonder Bright: Able-bodied slash non-disabled. This term is used to describe someone who does not identify as having a disability. Some members of the disability community oppose its use because it implies that all people with disabilities lack, quote, able bodies or the ability to use their bodies well. They may prefer, quote, non-disabled or, quote, enabled as being more accurate.
[00:22:45.765] Kent Bye: Yeah, so some of these different differentiations of the language is new insights that I haven't heard from other sources before. So just in terms of knowing what the preferred language and being sensitive to it.
[00:22:57.454] Wonder Bright: In terms of the language, I think one of the more intriguing things about this period of time that we're all living in, at least in the West, is that we're beginning to develop language and articulate these differences. There isn't a unified way of speaking about it yet. We're all stumbling around in the dark and perhaps us enabled or non-disabled people, anybody who's got privileges around any of these areas is hampered by the ways in which we don't know that we don't know something. And so it's in paying attention, it's in being attentive, it's in this listening that goes beyond words, but just into this capacity to be with one another, a raw human level that we're going to create these new languages and these new distinctions together. And I do my absolute best and will continue to do my best to try and take on language from communities or individuals as often the case. And individuals doesn't necessarily agree with their community. So prioritize the individual's use for whatever denomination that they would like to use for themselves.
[00:24:21.575] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's one other section that I just want to have you read because I think it talks to other aspects of how we can frame people who have disabilities as being like this superpower. So there's this other little section I'd love to have you just read just to put it out there as well.
[00:24:37.433] Wonder Bright: Terms like differently abled, special needs, handicapable, impaired, limited, wheelchair-bound are problematic. Framing disabled people as inspiring, courageous, etc. is dehumanizing and othering. The media at large has perpetuated these storylines to the detriment of disabled people.
[00:24:57.633] Kent Bye: I really appreciated reading through these different perspectives because I think it challenges some of the different framings that it can be easy to fall into. Like, oh, hey, look at how this filmmaker has this superpower of cultivating, of listening, kind of developing extrasensory capacities. Even that type of framing can be problematic in different ways. So anyway, I just wanted to call myself out on that. Trying to not dehumanize or otherize it by creating as the superpowers that they've cultivated because of their disability, that they are exiled in some sense. They may find themselves on the side of communication gaps or playing the telephone game. I think in some ways, this film is trying to encapsulate all that into an experience for a listening audience that is able to communicate these different dimensions of her experience of the capital D Deaf or lowercase d Deaf experience that she has.
[00:25:54.172] Wonder Bright: I actually didn't feel like this was a film for a listening audience in the way that we might traditionally think of it, as in people who can hear with their ears. I felt like it was a film for anybody who's listening with this other sense that she's introducing us to. If we rely overmuch on our ears for listening, like most hearing people like myself, I think do. And I think we just have to grant ourselves a lot of grace as a species as we try to figure out what this thing is. And when I think about it from an astrological perspective, illness or disability is something that's associated with the sixth house. which can't be seen by the first house and the first house is the sign that's rising on the horizon. And it's therefore the thing that dictates what is important in the chart. It's your body, it's yourself. And so when something can't see the first house, it becomes imperiled. And so the sixth house can't see the first house. And so this is one of the reasons why the sixth house is associated with illness. And so this stretch and this reach in ourselves to find language for this or that disability or this or that invisibility is part of the process of integrating everybody into the whole. And it's not something that can be arrived at by an individual, even though we have to prioritize an individual's experience. It's something that we collectively have to begin to understand. And so, you know, you and I making these mistakes as we're blundering our way through language that is new to us is part of that process. And we just have to have grace for ourselves and stay listening. I think that's all that we can do.
[00:27:57.444] Kent Bye: Awesome. And to wrap things up, what are you bearing witness to in the Tuba Thieves?
[00:28:05.026] Wonder Bright: I feel sort of overwhelmed with emotion thinking about it. I think what I want to bear witness to is the act of witnessing itself. And the different forms that that can take, that it happens through listening. That's not something I pay much attention to. I've actually been complaining to you for the last couple of days that my ears are getting blocked up. And I thought that was rather ironic given that we're going to be like talking so much. And since we've been having this conversation about the tuba thieves, it's just making me appreciate silence. What I want to bear witness to is being intentional about my listening and being intentional about what I share that I heard. Yeah.
[00:28:57.704] Kent Bye: Yeah, I feel like for me, I'm bearing witness to this third narrative space that's being created in this film in the way that the different innovations of captions and the specialized context, but also making sense of the film is the film. And I feel like the process that we've gone through here in this conversation as us trying to orient ourselves into this film, both from What our experience of it was, but also what was provided to us in these clues and this press packet to unpack and have different statements from the director, but also these lowercase D slash capital D Deaf and disability talking points was another part of me making sense of the film and making sense of the Deaf cultures and how they talk about themselves and the opportunity to kind of learn about that. and to retroactively project that back into what I was able to bear witness in the course of this film, which did have this sense of mystery and trying to puzzle together the puzzle pieces. And by the end of it, I hadn't put it all together. And so I had to kind of read through the synopsis and this filmmaker statement and having this conversation with you has helped to, at least for me, walk away understanding a little bit more about what this experience was all about. So, Just want to thank you for joining us on Story All the Way Down. To learn more about this film or the podcast, visit storyallthewaydown.com. There you'll find some show notes, more information about the podcast, and opportunities to support what we're doing. Thanks again for listening.
