A film about the sounds of Los Angeles as perceived by plants, animals, and people
Between 2011 and 2013, the Los Angeles area saw a series of thefts when tubas, and in some cases other musical instruments, disappeared from various high schools. While media attention focused on the search for the perpetrators and their possible motives, d/Deaf artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel began to wonder what the school band now sounds like without the tuba, or what happens to the students that used to play the missing instruments. And actually, what is it like to live in a world where certain sounds are “missing”?
The result is the feature film The Tuba Thieves (2023). With the thefts being largely just a framework, O’Daniel rather focuses on the everyday life of several characters who mostly have nothing to do with the missing tubas. Two of them can be considered main characters, even though they never meet: d/Deaf musician Nyke with a circle of close friends, her partner, and her father; and Geovanny, who played the saxophone in one of the school bands affected by the thefts.
The film doesn’t have a coherent plot; we mainly see brief moments from a variety of characters’ lives with a lot of detours and no clear continuity. Some reveal anxiety about the future, as in the case of Nyke’s conversation with her father regarding her pregnancy, but mostly they capture everyday life, like sitting in the garden with a bunch of friends, skateboarding in the park, or two partners having a conversation in the evening. They are just short glimpses of their lives that don’t create a story with a clear beginning and end. During the film, a sign appears on a panel that might guide us on how to watch: “There is no mathematical logic here. Pay attention like you look at the sea, the stars, or a landscape.”
At the same time, the environment and the soundscape of Los Angeles are an important part of the film – it speaks not only of the absence of the sounds but also of their astonishing ubiquity. There are constant fires around the city, we often hear the news on the radio or flying helicopters that try to put them out. Through camera traps, we see the animals just outside the city affected by these fires and noise. O’Daniel also looks at how the expansion of LAX airport has affected the neighborhoods that suddenly find themselves under the flight paths. The breaking of the sound barrier – the moment when the plane reaches the speed of sound, which is both visible and audible – is mentioned several times throughout the film, and we can understand it as its main metaphor. Less dramatic, but no less important, are “casual”, often overlooked sounds such as a click of a briefcase put on the floor or the rattling of skateboard wheels on the pavement.
The film also includes three stand-alone scenes capturing historical moments, namely three fascinating concerts: the premiere of John Cage’s 4’33” in 1952, the last event at San Francisco’s Deaf Club organized by Bruce Conner in 1979, and a secret concert by Prince at Gallaudet University for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing people during the Purple Rain Tour in 1984. But they are not just historical reenactments, O’Daniel appropriates them. In the first case, she is interested in a man who, irritated by Cage’s concert, goes into the forest, perhaps wanting to listen to its sounds. In the Deaf Club, we watch a group of elderly d/Deaf people calmly play cards at a table and talk about life as if they weren’t at a punk concert. The third scene is set up as a television interview with two concert audience members in sign language.
Captions are an essential part of the overall aesthetics of the film. They don’t just provide plain information about words or sounds, they are rather evocative (for example: “Ocean rhythm of Alex’s [skateboard] wheels”) and playful (for example: “A tuba s t r e t c h e d”, or the rising number of decibels when a plane is flying over). They multiply on the screen just as sounds are layered on top of each other; they can even be disorienting like during the punk concert at the Deaf Club. Because that’s the experience of many people, whether d/Deaf, hard of hearing, or hearing, with the world.
In November, Alison O’Daniel was a guest at the One World International Documentary Film Festival. There we talked together about how the film was created, what fascinated her about the tuba theft stories, how her personal experience of deafness influenced the structure of the film, or what are the unexplored possibilities of captioning.
The film is inspired by real events – tubas being stolen from high schools across the Los Angeles area. It references the thefts, but it’s more of a point of departure, and the film is actually about something else. What was your thought process when you started working on this project?
The first thing I knew was that the film was going to be called The Tuba Thieves, and it wasn’t going to be about the thieves. I talked very openly about that. I didn’t like that the focus in the reporting was always the same: the thieves and the tubas. I was interested in the experiences of the students at different schools. When I was talking to them, they each had interesting stories that were portraits of the economics of the schools. For example, in one school the band teacher had a budget of approximately 47 dollars for the school year. All she could afford was dry-erase markers. That is the documentary element of the film. I’m not making a documentary about why this band instructor can only afford dry-erase markers and can’t replace actual tubas – and then she has to use a tuba that’s duct-taped or a tuba that a woman has donated to them because it had been only sitting in her garage for 30 years. All these funny, touching stories are the background research.
What I was tapping into was the socioeconomics of different neighborhoods, and how that impacts schools. Or how it impacts someone who lives under a flight path. What does it mean that a wealthy neighborhood gets moved when LAX airport is constructed, whereas right next to it there is a neighborhood that still has to be under a flight path? For me, the film is a story of who gets resources to soundproof their home, and who has to go without a tuba. Or who doesn’t have access to captioning in films. I was thinking about disenfranchisement through sound in a particular city, even in the case of animals who are underneath helicopters dropping fire retardants.
When did the “LAX story” become part of the film?
It’s one of the things that happened late in the process. About seven years in, I learned about Surfridge, a neighborhood that had been eminent domain because of the development of LAX. I saw a photo (that’s actually in the film) with a little boy covering his ears and running along the side of his house. It’s from a 1960s magazine, and a caption underneath said: “Children are losing their hearing”. I got really angry about it. Seven years in, I tapped into this rage I felt about sound discrepancies. That was when I started to articulate that the tubas for me are about grief, and inequities.
It took me many years in the process of making the film to understand this much deeper theme and attraction I had to the story of tuba thefts. I think I knew it, but I just hadn’t quite put language to it. It pointed towards a projected grief. I’ve always grown up with this language of hearing loss, but at one point I learned that in the d/Deaf community, there’s this flip of words where people talk about having deaf gain as opposed to hearing loss. I started to think about how sensitive I am to sound, and how interested I am in the world of sound and hearing. There are a lot of things that are irritating and super frustrating and really hard, but being d/Deaf or hard of hearing is not a tragedy. What I get out of it is an interesting way of connecting with people and thinking about the world – everything that’s made me an artist.
When you began working on the film, you started with music, actually. You asked three composers to create music, and then according to the music you created the script. Why did you start with the composers?
The original goal was that I wanted to direct like a composer, and I wanted the composers to be more like directors. And then there was this other thing I started saying: This is going to be a listening project. I knew it was going to be a listening project, but not necessarily ear listening – even though I was not sure what that meant.
That’s how this film was made. Take for example the man who walks in the forest at the very end. I never knew why he took his shoes off. I didn’t have a reason for him when I was directing the actor. I told him about a workshop I had done where somebody had taught us how to walk quietly like a predator hunting prey, and how to not break twigs if you’re in the forest. That was what I taught him to do. Clearly, the goal was for him to walk quietly, but I don’t know exactly why he was compelled to do that. I tried to do that throughout the process of making the film, not necessarily knowing every single motivation. Just pose these almost like experiments and then see where they lead me.
So there were three questions or challenges for me at the beginning: Can this be a film about the tuba thefts, but not about the thieves? Can I direct like a composer? And can this be a listening project not intended for ears, and then what does that mean? I think the film is the answer.
Could you describe the process of working with the compositions?
I knew I wanted to work with Christine Sun Kim, Steve Roden, and Ethan Frederick Greene because they were thinking in a pretty expansive way about music. I didn’t want to impose any narrative on them, so I gave them things that were in my studio like pictures of architecture, poems, and really random images. I divided them into three piles and sent them to each of the composers. Only Christine, who is also d/Deaf, got stories about the tuba thefts. She was doing a lot of field recordings and one day she saw a marching band and recorded it. But she distorted and changed it so the marching band almost sounded like it was underwater.
I listened to the music for seven months, writing down stuff that was coming up in my mind. Then some of those references started going back into the film and I was also adding stories I was hearing, for example about the Deaf Club in 1979. It was an interesting, about a year-long process of gathering material and trying to see how it all could work together. I was connecting the dots between the pieces, trying to make some sort of a plausible narrative.
You mentioned the Deaf Club and the man who leaves the John Cage concert. Why did you choose to include the three stand-alone scenes with historical concerts and why those three and not others?
They were completely anecdotal. Now I can’t even imagine the film without the John Cage scene, but it was an accident. One of the original references that I gave to the composers was a picture from a book on hippie architecture in Woodstock I found at a flea market. It was a photo of a concert hall, and when Steve saw it, he wrote me back: “You realize that’s where John Cage premiered 4’33”, right?” I had no idea! Steve had just finished doing daily meditations on 4’33”, and he was convincing me to do something with it.
At first, I didn’t want to, I found it cheesy. But then I happened to be in Hudson, New York, which is very close to Woodstock, so I went to see the concert hall, and it was amazing. It’s basically a barn in the forest; and when I got there, I realized the premiere of 4’33” was actually about the sound of the trees, the sound of the wind. But that’s not what you ever hear about when people talk about 4’33”. They talk about silence, or they talk about music being more than just keys being played. I realized this mythology of silence has followed 4’33”, and it’s the same mythology that follows deafness. People think deafness is a silent experience. It was at that moment I decided to include 4’33” in the film. I could connect the two wrong ideas about two things.
Actually, when I was going to Hudson, I was with an old punk who asked me: “You know about the Deaf Club, right?” I didn’t. I started doing research and told myself I was going to do something with it. For a long time, it was just these two concerts. Later I learned about Prince doing a concert at Gallaudet, and it became the three. It was really just a matter of them coming into my world.
At the same time, you not only include the concerts in the film but you give the stories a twist which is most apparent in the John Cage scene. What was the idea behind that?
I didn’t want to just put 4’33” there, so I decided to write in a fictional character whose name was the Irritated Man. He’s irritated by 4’33”, gets up, and leaves. That was a moment when I realized I was starting with these anecdotes, whether it’s the tuba thefts or a concert, and I can do anything I want with them. I can be even annoyed by them, and that can become part of the film. That developed my voice. There was so much play in it: How far can I push this? What are the possibilities?
Doing this, I was also using my experience of hearing as a model. In my daily life, I may hear something and start to go down a path and then someone says: “That’s not what we’re talking about.” They asked me something about my parents and I answered what my favorite ice cream flavor was. It can be funny, but sometimes it can be really confusing: Why are you over here when this is what’s actually happening in the room? To me, that was potentially a fascinating way to try and build a whole series of narratives that were drifting in a lot of different directions.
So how did you build the structure of the film?
The tuba thefts are in the actual order they happened. They are a kind of chapters, even though I don’t think of them as such. The first one was the fall of 2011, and the last one was the spring of 2013. That’s the time period of the film. It’s all within a two-year period of time, but I think the only real marker of time is Nyke’s pregnancy. The time in the film is also linear, but it doesn’t really feel evident. Plus, there are three concerts that are fully stand-alone sections.
In my mind, the closest thing to a resolution is that Kendrick Lamar bought one of the high schools eight tubas because he was an alumnus. That’s a sort of conclusion of the tuba thefts because, in real life, the police didn’t care; they weren’t doing anything about it. I love that detail, but it doesn’t necessarily fix the schools’ money problems or the fact that some schools don’t even have the tubas. The ending is so inconclusive. I wasn’t going to solve the cases and tie them up with a bow; that’s not the real experience.
My goal isn’t necessarily to have a starting point and an ending point. I don’t think that’s what life is like. I liked the possibility of a film narrative not being contained by that expectation. It’s more of a development like when somebody gets pregnant, they wrestle with their feelings about pregnancy, and they’re dealing with it with their parents. It doesn’t have to be anything super dramatic.
For me, in the end, the film is about the daily life of a group of people who are hard of hearing or d/Deaf. The film, in a poetic and quite sensorial way, recreates how they experience the world.
That’s the main point. It’s not about a narrative, it’s about the experience. That’s the way the film is written and edited. There’s Nyke and her sort of everyday with her boyfriend or with her father, and there’s Geovanny’s sort of everyday in school, or him getting kicked out of his house.
I was thinking about the way I hear as a kind of structure of the film. I wanted to put the audience into an experience where they really didn’t know what on Earth was going on and how things connected. But they don’t get up and walk out. That was always my goal. Or rather it was more of a question of how to make a film like that because I didn’t know if I’d be able to. Would it be possible to have d/Deaf people, hard of hearing people, and hearing people all sit through the same film and have different experiences? All not really know how everything ties together, but all stay?
I’m trying to propose a different value system that can be experienced cinematically. Someone once asked me if I could say in one sentence what this film was about, and I said: It’s about the sounds of Los Angeles as perceived by plants, animals, and people.
“Random” sounds of Los Angeles are so important for the film. Where did it come from?
I love the sound of L.A.; it’s weirdly soothing. If I go to the ocean, I honestly cannot tell the difference between the sounds of waves and the traffic. No one in L.A. uses their horns, and even though you’re stuck in traffic, which can be really annoying, it’s a pretty quiet experience – as opposed to New York City where everything is vertical, sound is crashing off of hard surfaces, and everybody who drives uses their horn as an extension of yelling. The topography of L.A. is very rolling, so the sound is laid-back and peaceful. It doesn’t mean that all the sound is lovely, but I find it beautiful.
I remember one time I was staying with a friend in L.A. and laughing because she has really sharp hearing and became irritated with the sound of construction down the street. There was a truck backing up and beeping; but at the same time, there was a bird chirping, and the sounds together were so beautiful. I started to think about unexpected or unwanted sounds accompanying wanted sounds. About judgments why the bird sound is considered beautiful, but the beeping at the construction site is ugly or awful or frustrating or an interruption to your piece.
I think it’s perceptual sensitivity. For some people, it’s awful to watch a movie that narratively doesn’t offer a conclusion. But for me, it’s amazing to float at the end or sink or cry. Or walk out so frustrated because you didn’t get resolution – that is also interesting.
You encourage the audience to watch the film with balloons in their hands so they can feel the vibrations of the soundtrack. Could you tell us more about this practice?
First of all, it’s very casual. It’s just something that people would do in deaf clubs; they would watch a movie holding balloons. And not every single d/Deaf person holds a balloon when they listen to music or watch film – I’m sure barely anyone does now.
In 2011, when I was showing my first film, I had people hold balloons. When we went to Sundance earlier this year, I mentioned it to my producers and suggested it might be a fun thing to do for the premiere. People loved it and continued to ask us to bring balloons. It was never my intention for this film to be experienced in every screening like that.
But it is a really poetic idea that you use your breath to feel the soundtrack. Just because of the nature of sound waves, they do travel through that material, and so you can feel quite sensitively all the aspects of the soundtrack that you otherwise are just, if you’re hearing, hearing, if you’re d/Deaf, reading, and maybe feeling in your seat.
The film became well-known for its use of captions which were not added only later for translation but became an integral part of the film, giving it another layer of meaning. It’s part of the aesthetics of the film. What was your thought process behind that?
For me, it’s another space to explore the storytelling. It gives more detail about the sounds, but there’s also a whole depth of story that’s happening through the captioning. It’s making the sound beyond a hearing thing; it’s imaginative. I think it’s doing a lot of what happens in soundtracks.
I remember having this amazing moment when I watched Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). I hate this movie so much, but I was crying and thinking: Wow, this is power. I cannot stand what I’m watching but I am totally emoting. They have won; I am controlled right now. I didn’t care about her or her story or any of the characters in that film, or how it was made; I was judging it and was unsatisfied and yet… You see a person on the screen, you match them because we’re human, and the music just lets it out. I think there’s a space for language to do some equivalency of that, which is a really fascinating experiment. Unfortunately, it’s just an experiment; that’s it. Captioning is an afterthought in other films.
There was one thing that was lost in the Slovak captioning. When the music fades in, I had the caption also fade in. That wasn’t in the Slovak version. When I did that captioning, it was a revelation for me. It is so obvious – why hasn’t this existed before? When I was talking to the person who made the Slovak subtitles, I got the answer: she said there was no technology for captioning that could do that.
Is it possible to compare d/Deaf and hearing audience’s reaction to your film?
I haven’t gotten very different feedback which is thrilling to me. That was my goal. Actually, I have noticed that the d/Deaf audience doesn’t have quite as much trouble with the narrative, they don’t ask me questions about the story. And they also don’t ask me questions about captioning because there’s obviousness about it.
I think that d/Deaf experiences and hearing experiences are really different in our world, so I also expected them to be different when watching my film. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that both audiences are responding quite positively. And I’m really touched the hard-of-hearing audience in the middle is included and feel that. That’s important to me, personally.
Then there are these funny negative reviews from people who just wanted a straightforward documentary about the tuba thefts. Sometimes I have negative feelings about them, but they also make me laugh. It’s always a film bro who complains that this is incomprehensible and wants to know what happened to the tubas. Well, sorry.
Proofreading: Anna Ďurišíková
Pictures:
[1, 5] photo: Šimon Lupták, One World International Documentary Film Festival
[2 – 4] The Tuba Thieves (dir. Alison O’Daniel)
Between 2011 and 2013, the Los Angeles area saw a series of thefts when tubas, and in some cases other musical instruments, disappeared from various high schools. While media attention focused on the search for the perpetrators and their possible motives, d/Deaf artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel began to wonder what the school band now sounds like without the tuba, or what happens to the students that used to play the missing instruments. And actually, what is it like to live in a world where certain sounds are “missing”?
The result is the feature film The Tuba Thieves (2023). With the thefts being largely just a framework, O’Daniel rather focuses on the everyday life of several characters who mostly have nothing to do with the missing tubas. Two of them can be considered main characters, even though they never meet: d/Deaf musician Nyke with a circle of close friends, her partner, and her father; and Geovanny, who played the saxophone in one of the school bands affected by the thefts.
The film doesn’t have a coherent plot; we mainly see brief moments from a variety of characters’ lives with a lot of detours and no clear continuity. Some reveal anxiety about the future, as in the case of Nyke’s conversation with her father regarding her pregnancy, but mostly they capture everyday life, like sitting in the garden with a bunch of friends, skateboarding in the park, or two partners having a conversation in the evening. They are just short glimpses of their lives that don’t create a story with a clear beginning and end. During the film, a sign appears on a panel that might guide us on how to watch: “There is no mathematical logic here. Pay attention like you look at the sea, the stars, or a landscape.”
At the same time, the environment and the soundscape of Los Angeles are an important part of the film – it speaks not only of the absence of the sounds but also of their astonishing ubiquity. There are constant fires around the city, we often hear the news on the radio or flying helicopters that try to put them out. Through camera traps, we see the animals just outside the city affected by these fires and noise. O’Daniel also looks at how the expansion of LAX airport has affected the neighborhoods that suddenly find themselves under the flight paths. The breaking of the sound barrier – the moment when the plane reaches the speed of sound, which is both visible and audible – is mentioned several times throughout the film, and we can understand it as its main metaphor. Less dramatic, but no less important, are “casual”, often overlooked sounds such as a click of a briefcase put on the floor or the rattling of skateboard wheels on the pavement.
The film also includes three stand-alone scenes capturing historical moments, namely three fascinating concerts: the premiere of John Cage’s 4’33” in 1952, the last event at San Francisco’s Deaf Club organized by Bruce Conner in 1979, and a secret concert by Prince at Gallaudet University for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing people during the Purple Rain Tour in 1984. But they are not just historical reenactments, O’Daniel appropriates them. In the first case, she is interested in a man who, irritated by Cage’s concert, goes into the forest, perhaps wanting to listen to its sounds. In the Deaf Club, we watch a group of elderly d/Deaf people calmly play cards at a table and talk about life as if they weren’t at a punk concert. The third scene is set up as a television interview with two concert audience members in sign language.
Captions are an essential part of the overall aesthetics of the film. They don’t just provide plain information about words or sounds, they are rather evocative (for example: “Ocean rhythm of Alex’s [skateboard] wheels”) and playful (for example: “A tuba s t r e t c h e d”, or the rising number of decibels when a plane is flying over). They multiply on the screen just as sounds are layered on top of each other; they can even be disorienting like during the punk concert at the Deaf Club. Because that’s the experience of many people, whether d/Deaf, hard of hearing, or hearing, with the world.
