(In the voice of Kurt Vonnegut at the beginning of “Slaughterhouse-Five”) Listen. No, pay attention. You can’t sit back and passively watch this one. This is a film you must see, hear, read. And I say “must” for a reason.
So many films are praised for being “unlike anything seen before” that the compliment feels empty — I’ll throw it at Alison O’Daniel’s (“Night Sky”) “The Tuba Thieves” anyway. “The Tuba Thieves” questions what a film can do more than any film I’ve seen at Sundance this year.
The first scene shows us a leaf blower. Bright aqua subtitles read “[leaf blower]” and then specify the blower’s precise decibel level. Soon after, we are in a room with Nature Boy (Russell Harvard, “There Will Be Blood”), where he takes a hearing test requiring him to repeat words back to a moderator sitting in a separate room on the other side of a glass panel. Shortly after that, we watch an unidentifiable group of people steal tubas at a high school football game. The scenes don’t tell a clear story. There’s not an obvious point of similarity between one and the next.
Intertitles tell us the locations of California high schools from which tubas (and later other instruments) have been stolen, giving us a stolen instrument count from each. These notations trace the nonfictional part of the film; these robberies really did occur between 2011 and 2013.
The film is creative nonfiction, an oxymoronic-sounding genre that in this case involves combining documentary and fiction. The nonfictional part depicts the instrument theft. The fictional scenes center on Nature Boy’s girlfriend Nyeisha “Nyke” Prince (“Savage/Love”), a pregnant, deaf woman who plays herself and Geovanny Marroquin, debuting as himself, a drum major at one of the high schools whose tubas were taken.
Other scenes don’t strictly fit the category of tuba-related documentary or fictional scene: wildlife camera footage of mountain lions drinking from a pool of water, an upside down highway shot more effective than any I have seen, where the camera flies backward through an underpass and around curves with an energy that pulls the viewer along, even as the purpose of this scene remains elusive. While these scenes are disconnected and confusing if I tried to justify their existence as related to a story, they work by drawing the viewer away from that need for clear narrative toward the experience of the film as a complete piece of art.
I quickly realized the disparate scenes were probably not going to tie together in a traditional narrative and wondered why I was so compelled by something I didn’t know how to interpret. What was it about? Stories make films captivating, and there wasn’t much of a story.
In her work with film, sculpture and other media, O’Daniel, who is deaf, explores sound by combining it with image and performance. “The Tuba Thieves” is akin to an interactive art exhibit: The audience is invited to experience something with multiple senses, let it envelop them for an hour and a half and leave them wondering how to interpret it. They hold an overarching idea of its sensibility rather than a detailed plotline.
The characters and events of “The Tuba Thieves” are less important than sound, the underlying subject and narrator. The stories are bound by interactions with sound and its absence. Nyke and Nature Boy have expressive conversations in sign language while relative silence surrounds them. The original leaf blower is followed later by scenes from the highway, providing a dull, humming soundscape. This is interrupted by purposeful, entertaining sound in various musical performances. During a concert, a family discusses their family member in sign language while music pulses around them.
Subtitles usually feel like an afterthought that, on their own, give only a blurry idea of events. In “The Tuba Thieves,” they do more — color coded for spoken or signed dialogue and often written to include a certain cadence. Decibel levels are noted. When musical instruments are played, the subtitles include descriptions of the type of sound they make — a note is “[stretched]” and the spaces between the letters in “stretched” are themselves large, an evocative visual representation of what typical subtitles would only hint at. O’Daniel explores sound, but particularly its relationship to film.
How can language itself tell a story? Not always the way we imagine it doing so in film. When Nature Boy takes the hearing test, he becomes irritable, takes off the headset and switches to sign language, combining all of the words he was asked to repeat in a story told dramatically with the motions of his hands, extending to his arms and whole body. He gives life to the story with this language. There’s an appreciation for sign language here that I haven’t seen — an acknowledgement not only of its existence but of what it provides both “speaker” and “listener.”
The film’s title card alone treads the line of the intersection between language and sound, the places they intersect and diverge. Nyke opens a closet door and we see only her hands. They sign the letters comprising “The Tuba Thieves” while subtitles tell unfamiliar viewers what she is saying. It is somewhere between a spoken and written title. It contains meaning but also movement, objective interpretation and the individual intonation of Nyke’s quickly-moving fingers. It gives us an image, hints at a voice, and then it is gone.
Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.