The Tuba Thieves
This week we are showing Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves (2023) on Wednesday, February 11th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’ll start the show at 7:10!
As one might guess, my interest in the film The Tuba Thieves was initially piqued by the title; how could I not be intrigued by my beloved low brass instrument getting more representation on screen? Watching Alison O’Daniel’s experimental, free-associative collage of d/Deaf experience in and around Los Angeles, however, quickly revealed that the tubas play a larger role in their absence than presence in the film—stemming from an anecdote about tubas being stolen from various SoCal high schools—but that film itself is all the richer for it.
One could say that The Tuba Thieves is something of an inverted, 21st-century “City Symphony” film—a genre popular in the 1920s that captures urban environments through a kaleidoscopic encyclopedia of documentary footage, crafting a holistic image of the collision of humanity and technology that “expressed modernist hopes that human ingenuity, exemplified by the towering accomplishment of contemporary cities, could lead humanity to a new golden age.” See Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) for a prototypical example.
The Tuba Thieves, however, bases itself in the experience of d/Deaf people, an experience that fundamentally alters the understanding of how a city can be a “symphony.” Through a loose weave of narrative threads and performance pieces, sonic sculptures and open-caption metafilm, historic recreations of performances of John Cages 4’33” and Deaf punk clubs, ASL poetry readings, and more, O’Daniel’s film pointedly doesn’t provide a cohesive, techno-utopian view of Los Angeles (perhaps the postmodern metropolis par excellence, as reading a handful of Mike Davis books has convinced me), but instead fosters a powerful feeling of inconclusivity regarding how any of us understands the world around us. As Jordan Lord writes about the film, “This process of struggling to fill in the gaps is integral to how the film enacts a desegregation of Deaf and hearing audiences by both sharing and limiting the information to which they’re given access.”
Part of the reason we’re showing The Tuba Thieves this week is also to highlight our buddies at 5th Avenue Cinema’s programming of Compensation (1999), another fascinating and brilliant metacinematic exploration of d/Deaf culture as it intersects with Black experience, recently restored by Janus Films/Criterion. See both this week!
[aggressive typing]
Charlie, Stefan, Stark