LOS ANGELES — Between 2011 and 2013, thieves committed a series of burglaries at 12 Los Angeles-area high schools, stealing tubas from southern music venues. This curious anecdote gives the title to the recent film by artist Alison O’Daniel The tuba thieves. Although it features re-enactments of the robberies, the film does not focus solely on the incidents; instead, he weaves these scenes with other loosely related narratives into a patchwork of loss, grief, communication, community, difficult shifts in perspective, and the different ways we experience the world at through sound, vision and touch.
At the age of three, O’Daniel was diagnosed with 60% binaural hearing loss and identifies as d/deaf (the lowercase “d” representing the physical state of deafness, and the “D” capital letter indicating “cultural deafness” or a connection to the deaf community). She uses hearing aids but grew up in a hearing family and didn’t learn American Sign Language (ASL) until adulthood. Although she may “pass” as a hearing person – you may not realize she is deaf from looking at her or talking to her – she still faces daily challenges that hearing people might see as ranging from self.
“There’s always a mess in my life that comes from catching up, compensating, trying to figure things out… The relentlessness of ableism, it’s constant on a daily basis,” she said. Hyperallergic. “When I miss things in conversations and fill in gaps, it’s super exhausting.”
O’Daniel says she had two goals when she started making the film ten years ago. One was to recreate that sense of perceptual instability and compensation in the audience “without people walking out.”
“That was the challenge,” she said. “How can I get people to care about this feeling?”
It does this by offering spoken dialogue, ASL, and written subtitles on an equal footing, without prioritizing audio, as hearing audiences are used to. Sounds swell and cut abruptly, resulting in an unsettling feeling for those who rely exclusively on sound to guide their experience.
She also plays with the barriers between narration, documentary and art film. Much of the film’s funding came from documentary sources, but it features both recreations of real events as well as fictionalized scenarios and was screened at festivals in the documentary and narrative categories. An earlier version of the film was shown in Made in LA at the Hammer Museum in 2018, where it was presented as an installation alongside a sculptural work.
O’Daniel also reversed the traditional way films are created, starting with the soundtrack instead of the script. She gave visual sources to three composers: the late Ethan Frederick Greene and artists Christine Sun Kim, who is also deaf, and Steve Roden, who created compositions around which she built the film.
She talks about The tuba thieves as a “listening project”, which “made me deeply curious and interested in the way I experience sound and use it as a kind of fundamental structure for the construction of a film”.
To some, it may seem counterintuitive to discuss “deafness” and “hearing” together, but that’s exactly the misconception that O’Daniel says she’s trying to correct. “It’s just something that constantly needs to be debunked,” she says.
One such scene in the film recreates John Cage’s 1952 performance of 4’33” at the Maverick Concert Hall in upstate New York. The seminal piece of experimental music involves the performer sitting in front of a piano, lifting the lid and sitting quietly for four minutes and 33 seconds without touching the keys. “I went to visit the concert hall and realized it was so loud, it’s the sound of the forest,” she recalls. “I was amazed by the longevity of the mythology around 4’33” being about silence and that’s when I thought, ‘it’s the same mythology about deafness, it’s like experiencing silence.’ In the scene, shot on location, a disgruntled member of the audience leaves the performance to find the sounds of the surrounding countryside engulfed.
This leads to his second goal with the film. “I really wanted to bombard people with this intense, pervasive sound experience. I hoped people would leave feeling that as an inner calm.
The film features a dense background sound of leaf blowers, whirring helicopters, hissing waves and mountain lions lapping water captured by night vision cameras. The audience is keenly aware of their presence as they give up, followed by periods of quiet.
It’s also the everyday sounds of Los Angeles, to which O’Daniel adds a scene from concept artist and accomplished drummer Charles Gaines behind the kit, and a segment on Chalino Sánchez, the legendary norteño ballader, whose narcocorridos can be heard banging from the car windows through LA. Gaines will be in conversation with O’Daniel when The tuba thieves screens to LA Museum of Contemporary Art next Thursday, April 27.
Between these scenes, the film follows various fictitious and reconstructed vignettes: a love story between Nyke, played by deaf actor and drummer Nyeisha Prince, and Nature Boy, played by Russell Harvard, of there will be blood (2007) and Pavement (2022); the effect of the snorkel flights on Geovanny Marroquin, a bandmaster at one of the schools; and a 1979 concert at the Deaf Club, a short-lived punk club housed in a real community space for deaf people in San Francisco. Although there was archival footage of space, O’Daniel chose not to use it, “because I really wanted to recreate it from a tone-deaf perspective…I wanted to control the picture.”
But why use snorkel flights to frame all these disparate stories? For O’Daniel, they epitomize the isolation and misunderstandings that come with deafness. What does it mean when a band loses its lowest ratings? How does this affect schools in mostly underdeveloped areas that have to deal with these losses?
“It took me a very, very long time to realize that I was making a film about grief,” she says. “I realized that all my life I had been told I had ‘hearing loss’. In the deaf community, we use the term “deaf gain”. It’s such a nice turn of phrase, because someone who’s hard of hearing but passes, it’s still about hearing loss.
“But if you’re raised in the Deaf culture, there’s a luminosity, a kind of cultural support that feels really concrete to me from that position of not having had that,” O’Daniel continued. “And then in those 10 years, an arts movement for people with disabilities happened and to have that community, I can’t even express the depth of emotional relief.”
