An intriguing thought and sound experiment, The Tuba Thieves takes as its starting point the fact that between 2011 and 2013, tubas were stolen from 12 high schools in Southern California. After establishing this, writer-director Alison O’Daniel offers a fictionalized collage that loosely follows a Deaf couple (Nyeisha Prince and Russell Harvard) and—in unconnected scenes—a high-school tuba player who lost his instrument (Geovanny Marroquin). These dramatized sequences—many of which feature American Sign Language—are interspersed with documentary-like sections depicting various examples of noise pollution around Los Angeles, as well as recreations/archival footage of historical events that involved sound in a notable way (as when Prince played a surprise concert at Gallaudet University, which serves the deaf and signing community). As a hearing viewer, it’s fascinating and instructive to experience a movie that intentionally puts you on the outside, listening in—relying not only on subtitles for the ASL conversations, but also sitting during long stretches of images accompanied by silence. (It’s worth noting that some of the subtitles describing the sounds on the screen are especially poetic, such as the “rush and fall” of waves at the beach.) The Tuba Thieves doesn’t quite have the mastery of the collage form you’ll find in somewhat similar experiments like Leviathan or Cameraperson, so that some of its ideas and images can feel scattershot, yet it undeniably subverts the tools of cinema in a uniquely compelling way.
(3/12/2024)
