“The Tuba Thieves” premieres tonight at the Siskel Film Center. Get your tickets here.
“The Tuba Thieves,” directed by Alison O’Daniel, is a cinematic vision for the senses. I love films like these that let the viewers fill in the gaps, and bring you into a sensory whirlwind that you can just sit in. The film reminds me of Kirsten Johnson’s “Cameraperson,” a film that I loved because its director did not tell us her story, she showed it to us. And that spoke more volumes than mere narration. She edited different moments of herself as a cinematographer, and streamlined it together as her opus. Here in “Tuba Thieves,” O’Daniels takes us through her world as a partially deaf person, and her narrative is woven together by the senses and the sounds of Los Angeles. What I love about this film is how it meshes documentary and fiction.
The film’s premise begins with a real story that occurred in the Los Angeles area where tubas were being stolen from high schools. But the investigation is really more of a metaphor for what it is like to absorb mulitiple senses at once, when an element of sound is missing. O’Daniel plays with the medium, being of the deaf community and the Deaf community. Something I learned from the press notes is that the “deaf” community are people who cannot physically hear, and the “Deaf” community are people who are a part of the “Deaf” culture and community.
Something I really absorbed in this film is that you can hear music when you are deaf by just pulling from your other senses. It’s a beautiful thing. What I thought was the most powerful use of symbolism in this film were the driving scenes through tunnels. The radio’s signal would be disconnected and we would just hear the song or the radio show start to fizzle as the light at the end of the tunnel pulled us through figuratively and literally. It was kind of like a time out, and it was so comforting to me. It’s like in “Sound of Metal” when Riz Ahmed takes out his hearing aid, and we are just surrounded by the natural and beautiful elements around him.
In the press notes, O’Daniel describes her film like playing telephone, and how messages are passed along from person to person. For me, each sliver of a scene was an instrument that was strummed through beautifully until the end. There was a symphony building through these sounds, just like in Johnson’s films with the visuals. They also touch on a lot of ASL elements, like the decibel number onscreen, and how airplanes and their sound can be really deafening to some of the communities in the Los Angeles area.
I also connected with the protagonist Nyke Prince, a deaf musician and artist. We follow her story and her relationship with another deaf person, played by Russell Harvard, who is an actor. He played Daniel Day Lewis’ son in “There Will Be Blood,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. I am not deaf, but Nyke is dealing with some changes in her life that when I initially watched the film, I was thinking I may be headed for as well. I am someone who in the past has struggled with her mental health, but has come to a place where she is well-balanced in her life, and has a strong community around her.
Nyke’s Deaf community around her is her family, and you can see that. When she becomes pregnant, there are a lot of “what ifs” that come to her mind, but her relationship with this father figure in her life reminds her that she is not alone in this life change. That was comforting to me at the time, as I thought I was going to be having a similar change in my life. Like the sounds and the atmospheric awareness in the film, the people in this film also add to the colors of this opus by O’Daniel.
If you like “The Tuba Thieves,” watch “La Ciénaga,” directed by Lucrecia Martel, another sensory wonder streaming now on the Criterion Channel.
