By Rachel Kolb
Alison O’Daniel is a visual artist and filmmaker who works with sound, moving images, sculpture, and large-scale installations. She is the director of The Tuba Thieves, an experimental film that considers how listening can become a form of storytelling.
O’Daniel identifies as d/Deaf. She grew up wearing hearing aids in a hearing family and she started learning American Sign Language (ASL) as an adult. O’Daniel’s experiences of living on the d/Deaf spectrum inform her unique approach to filmmaking in The Tuba Thieves, which emphasizes a wider range of visual and sonic experiences than typically-hearing audiences often imagine.
As a fellow storyteller who has lived along this d/Deaf spectrum my entire life, swinging from ASL to spoken English to captions to various forms of sound and sight, I first watched The Tuba Thieves with delight. I immediately recognized the subversive playfulness at the heart of the film: its deep politics and humor, and the ways it centers a distinctive visual and aural sensibility, which can invite us to consider the sensory and communicative worlds we live in.
Here, O’Daniel talks about the cinematic sensibility she brings to this film, and some of the deeper ideas and viewpoints it reveals.
Creating the Visual and Sonic Elements in The Tuba Thieves
When you were making The Tuba Thieves, what elements informed your approach to visual storytelling? How did you decide to tailor your captions, film cuts and transitions, sound design, etc., to create the unique visual and sonic grammar in this film?
I started out telling the first cinematographer I worked with, Meena Singh, to film with her ears. The other visual elements that became important were filming with objects, poles, architecture, etc., “in the way.” I wanted the viewer to frequently want to lean around something to see better, or to physically push something out of view.
I wanted to simultaneously destabilize the viewer while they also got to look at a visual vocabulary that had massive and dynamic presence.
For the captions, I used different colors to distinguish between four forms of communication, which are spelled out like a key in the first high school marquee:
Blue – Sound, Pink – Spoken, White – Signed, Yellow – Considered.
The yellow captions refer to a fourth narrative voice that is more akin to ideas being communicated. The yellow and white captions do not have a sound corresponding to it.
The sound design was often intended to be very physical and felt. I frequently asked the sound design team if we could make the audience feel the sound in their bodies, and wanted to push the audio to certain extremes, such as utilizing bass sounds that were so intense that they might make the audience feel a bit sick.
Also, in scenes where sounds are loud, like the punk bands playing at the Deaf Club, or the scenes right under flight paths, I wanted to let the sound shift toward almost painful. My goal wasn’t to hurt the audience, but to acknowledge something that always baffles and interests me: as someone who is not hurt by sounds like feedback or ambulance sirens, but has witnessed hearing people flinch with those sounds, I wanted to include pain in the sonic vocabulary [with] a wide range of volumes, pitches, timbres, etc.
I never wanted to shy away from difficult experiences that could accumulate into something generative and maybe beautiful.
Is d/Deaf Storytelling a Thing?
In your view, is there such a thing as “d/Deaf storytelling”? Or “d/Deaf cinematography”?
I am not sure. I think there is, in that those of us on the Deaf spectrum are constantly grappling with sound and hearing, so we bring a depth of study to the subject. It’s a viewpoint that wrestles with the contradiction of our sensitivity to sound with the lack of cultural value that we’ve been granted in telling stories about that.
So there is a somewhat omnipresent irritation and anger in our storytelling—a sense of not being understood, of having to explain and educate, of always having to devote so much of our time to advocating.
In The Tuba Thieves, I gave myself permission to not explain anything to anyone, and that felt great.
This might be controversial to say, but I feel I’ve not really witnessed d/Deaf storytelling or cinematography, but rather a determination to fit into the able-bodied conception of what filmmaking already exists out there. Perhaps this is the cinephile in me colliding with/collaborating with the disabled part of me.
But I want a reinvention of cinematic language, and for all of us to be free of “proving ourselves.”
Somehow there is attention given and value ascribed if we are accepted by the mainstream—if a Deaf actor performs in a blockbuster for example—or if a hearing director tells a Deaf story and therefore “validates us.” The craving of that validation feels extremely toxic and abusive and unimaginative to me.
I am, on one level, appreciative that Deaf actors are playing deaf roles more and more because that has been a long time coming, but this is so bottom-of-the-barrel basic to me that I can barely even engage in that conversation.
I remain deeply skeptical of representations of Deaf people by hearing directors and film teams, and I know that in the Deaf community there is a growing sense that nondisabled film teams hire consultants to check a box that makes it okay for them to direct the story. This is cynical and they must hire consultants, but it should not stop there.
I pine for more d/Deaf/disabled creators, yes, but the real issue is there are not enough diverse (in identity and artistic taste and approach) disabled gatekeepers in the rooms that make decisions.
I hope the syntax and spatiality of ASL, and the social codes and values of Deafness, will inform more films made in the future.
There is a whole universe of Deafness: the ways we pay attention and communicate that feel like a beautiful and profound language (beyond ASL even), that could make its way into filmmaking—and I hope to see more of that.
What Hearing and d/Deaf Audiences Can Take from The Tuba Thieves
What viewing experience do you hope a hearing PBS audience will have while watching The Tuba Thieves?
I always had two goals while making The Tuba Thieves: I want the audience (both hearing and d/Deaf) to grapple with and become curious about their experience while watching.
I was most motivated by the experience of compensation. Deaf and HoH (Hard of Hearing) people frequently feel like they are 10 steps or so behind in gleaning information. This can be frustrating and dehumanizing. But it can also be funny and poetic. These experiences have helped me see the world in ways I think are remarkable and imaginative.
I recreated this feeling throughout the film: The specific ways information is lost, missed or miscommunicated, and then the process of catching up and putting the pieces together, of compensating to fill in gaps, is a huge element of the film.
I want this to be a generative experience. In acknowledging this reality and experience for d/Deaf/HoH audiences, I aimed to recreate it also for hearing audiences, to create empathy and understanding and patience, yes, but more importantly, to acknowledge our realities as a real way of being in the world that has potential for poetic resonance.
Second, I wanted to create a very noisy, sonically dense, and aurally intense experience that would leave the audience paradoxically feeling quiet and sensitive afterward. So I hope this happens for people.
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Tactile Tools and the Experience of Watching
Could you talk about your use of balloons at past screenings for this film? Are there any other activities you’d suggest for audiences as they watch?
The balloons are offered to all audience members as a way to access the soundtrack of the film through touch. The latex membrane of a balloon is very sensitive and soundwaves pass along the surface in incredible detail. The balloon is a throwback and homage to the ingenuity of historical Deaf audiences that would gather in Deaf clubs and watch movies together.
I don’t have any other activity suggestions for watching. My preference is that the audience plays the film on a good monitor with good sound and gives into the narrative logic of the film.
Go in with no expectations, try not to be distracted or walk away, trust the film and your experience while watching, and be open to the way it unfolds. In the film, a high school marquee has the following statement on it: “There is no mathematical logic here. Watch this like you would look at the sea, the stars, or a landscape.” This is my instruction or guidance for viewing.
Maintaining Curiosity as an Artist
What are some other artistic ideas you’re currently thinking about? In other words: how do you follow up The Tuba Thieves?
I have a few ideas for projects, but I keep thinking about how The Tuba Thieves kept my interest for a decade. The core idea—the tubas being stolen, and the constellation of people that I met through pursuing and researching that story, and the choices I made about how to build a project through listening—were deeply sustaining initial choices that fed me and kept me curious as an artist.
During this project, I learned what it means to commit to an idea and see it through. I remained fond of and interested in it for a long time, and therefore could tend and care for the project and myself as an artist throughout. I hope that the next projects are quicker, but equally motivating.
At the moment, I am at the beginning of two very different projects. One will be an episodic shape-shifter and will involve many d/Deaf performers. The other is a global project that, at its core, will deal with ableism, sonic abstraction, and the weaponization of sound. Two different directions: one might be pretty fun, but I hope will also have gravity and importance; the other might be a bit heavy, but I also hope will have gravity and poetics.
Read more of Alison’s thoughts about how to caption a film.
Rachel Kolb is a writer, speaker, and d/Deaf and disability advocate. Her essays have been published in The New York Times and The Atlantic, and she currently lives outside of Boston with her beagle.
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