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Review by Marya E. Gates ★★★★

challenging, but ultimately rewarding experiment that wants you to rethink what we take for granted within cinematic language

Review by Evan “Raymond Gun-Virus” Pincus ★★★★★ Liked

[VIBRATING AIR]

That’s all it all is, innit? Last Tuesday I went to a recital of several pieces by Alvin Lucier, a program titled “The Science of Sound.” Lucier’s work tended to apply, yes, a scientist’s analytical sense to acoustic phenomena - his works are written for rooms, echolocation devices, driven electrical wire, ambient noises. I told a friend about this recital, and he told me that Lucier’s best piece was one they didn’t play - Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra, written for solo triangle. He explained that on paper, it sounds like a cruel prank on the instrumentalist and the audience (much like other famous conceptual pieces), but approached correctly, it can ultimately be a quite remarkable study of overtones in space.

If Silver Streetcar can be “for the Orchestra,” who’s to say The Tuba Thieves can’t be a city symphony? And that’s just scratching the surface... 2023’s film to beat has come early!

Review by margot ★★★

[A TUBA  S  T  R  E  T  C  H  E  S]

excellent captions

Review by thomas. Liked

My favorite docs tend to be formally experimental and this one really surprised me. This is the story of sound-makers told by filmmakers who do not hear them which immediately upended all expectations I might have had for the film. Instead of searching for the thieves, the film spends very little time on that particular event and instead explores the larger sonic landscape and the non-heard stimuli produced simultaneous to sound. It’s the rumble created by sonic booms or the impacts of aircraft on the neighborhoods adjacent to LAX or the dangers of being a person who does not hear when a fire alarm sounds in the middle of the night. But that all makes the movie sound much more literal than it is. It’s not. It’s intuitive collage I found to be beautiful and compelling but I also understand the vexed reactions. It’s not about the tubas. It’s about everything else.

4

i’ve seen this 4 times now and i still don’t know who stole the fkn tubas smh

2

[CONSTANT WIND IN TREES]

Surfs a bit like Charles Burnett with LA landscape / industry / family dynamics, but centers d/Deaf experiences and perspectives, sculpting theirs and hearing experiences together into some kind of cinematic corrido with jet engines and nature talking to each other. Wholly experimental but also reminds me of a lot of charming early PBS NEA grant-core of the 70's 80's 90's that would usually maintain free-wheeling timeslots. You'd run into stuff like avant-garde performance art, then move immediately to community debates on infrastructure, then a live drum circle often led by some guy who says he's from Mars and is just visiting. The hidden gem of 2023, hopefully not for long!

2

Structured like a free associative mashup of like 5 different movies that I (and maybe only I) would have already been running to the theater for in the first place. If it’s not anything so hyperbolic as “the best film of my lifetime,” (which, love it though I do, it almost certainly isn’t), it’s definitely the one I’ve felt luckiest to be able to catch while it’s new. That this isn’t setting the world on fire (tonight’s sparsely populated screening was part of the brief hometown theatrical run, although of course, Los Angeles is typically on fire already) is downright criminal, although I it to a heavy bias, as it’s synthesizing a lot of ideas I’ve worked over about sensory experience in just about the exact way I’ve thought about them - I mean, one of the performers at the Deaf Club even has the same bass guitar as me!

Review by BoatOfRa ★★★★★ Liked

The Tuba Thieves approaches narrative as Cage’s 4’33” approaches the piano, the real-world thefts dramatized and referred to exert an oblique kind of gravity which bends the film’s sonics around it. O’Daniel’s cinematic experiment here is no less devastatingly total than Cage’s, instruments appear all throughout the film as expressive totems, an absence signifying not silence but a deeper kind of listening that its deaf/hard-of-hearing characters visualize and embody. The film imagines Cage’s piece, but also abandons it, following a listener into the woods, away from the piece as a philosophical sound exercise and extending it into the viewer’s physical being. This is a deeply lyrical film, a scrolling sign at one point tells us to “abandon mathematical reasoning” and…

Review by poppins ★★

God I'm a slut for good captions

Review by Michael Rodda ★★½

But…who stole the tubas?

Review by Evan “Raymond Gun-Virus” Pincus ★★★★★ Liked

Is there any escape from noise? Group chat asking me to tell them about the rabbits while I tell them this movie has “the 2666 structure” and is comparable to Walter Benjamin‘s Arcades Project. “No, no, you don’t understand! In his 2001 book The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich discusses the notion of what he calls database cinema,” I scream as I’m dragged behind the shed

Review by BeBraveMorvern ★★★★

Blending doc, narrative, and sensory experiment, hearing-impaired filmmaker Alison O’Daniel explores sound and perception. It’s inventive, informative, humane, often startling, and still accessible. 

The whole movie is close-captioned by default. More than inclusive, it’s expansive. The captions sometimes highlight the barely audible, like the squeak of shoe leather. A split-screen segment captions simultaneous conversations, one spoken, two in ASL. Throughout, O’Daniel uses language playfully or poetically, describing “hard rain and boomy thunder”; for a skateboarder, “ocean rhythm of Alex’s wheels”; a hushed sax solo transitions to “a more vulnerable melody.” 

Visually, her off-kilter framing leans towards redirection, dissecting faces, or centering the source of sound over the human listener. A lovely series of closeups on plants captures their sonic vibrations…