Writer-director Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves is inspired by a spate of thefts from Los Angeles-area high school marching bands between 2011 and 2013, though the details surrounding the incidents are only acknowledged in occasional title cards. O’Daniel instead uses the real-life tuba thefts as a springboard to explore, and in artistically fertile ways, how the removal of an integral part of a structure affects the larger whole.
The Tuba Thieves is specifically concerned with the experiences of being a member of the deaf and hard of hearing community. O’Daniel, herself a member of that community, distorts and manipulates image and audio throughout the film, sometimes even dropping out the latter, to fascinatingly reflect the disorientation that one can experience with the loss of hearing.
O’Daniel’s approach to narrative isn’t so much casual as it is coolly ambivalent. There’s a wisp of a plot, and it focuses on a pregnant deaf woman, Nyke (Nyeisha Prince), and her relationship with her boyfriend, Nature Boy (Russell Harvard), and how she deals with her impending motherhood. Interspersed throughout The Tuba Thieves are glimpses of everyday lives in Los Angeles, and O’Daniel subtly refracts them through a style marked by a sense of mischievousness akin to the spirit of the unconventional thefts that inspired the film.
Scenes that begin conventionally are soon upended, such as when the soundtrack cuts out during a high school band practice, or when a POV shot of a car entering and traveling through a dark tunnel emerges on the other side with the image flipped upside down. And because O’Daniel places a primacy on such sustained technical experimentation throughout to delineate a deaf person’s experience of the world, the film never veers into pat moralism.
The Tuba Thieves even sporadically jumps back in time and recreates three historical concerts: the 1952 premiere performance of John Cage’s legendary quasi-silent piece 4’33’’, the 1979 final punk show at the Deaf Club in San Francisco, and a free concert that Prince arranged in 1984 at Gallaudet University, the first college for the deaf in the United States. While these recreations, which almost beg for more context, are jarring detours from the scenes of everyday life set modern-day L.A., they’re still of a piece with The Tuba Thieves’s experimental spirit and, given the nature of the original shows, challenges to how the audience perceives sound.
Late in the film, Nyke signs to someone that her pregnancy is making her mind and thoughts go in many different directions. The moment is practically a justification on O’Daniel’s part of the way in which The Tuba Thieves hopscotches back and forth in time. This, too, reinforces a notion established by the film’s toying with sound and image: To approximate the perspective of a deaf person, it must be done on purely cinematic terms. And by doing just that, The Tuba Thieves is nothing less than a work of profound empathy, and of a truly singular nature.
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