Monday April 17, 2023, 7:30 PM, UCSC Communications 150 (Studio C)
[OPEN TO THE UCSC COMMUNITY]
USA / 2023 / 91 minutes
open captions
From 2011 to 2013, a string of puzzling burglaries took place in Southern California: tubas went missing from a dozen high schools. Alison O’Daniel’s genre-defying debut was sparked by these events. Imagining what a band might sound like stripped of its deepest sound, the visual artist and filmmaker asks what it means to listen. The film winds through storylines blending documentary, narrative, and reenactment—one centered on a Deaf drummer playing a fictionalized version of herself, another following the school communities dealing with the theft—with ingenious interpretations of history-making concerts, from John Cage’s 4’33’ to the last punk show at San Francisco’s Deaf Club, interspersed throughout. A story told through sound and its absence, The Tuba Thieves embraces the possibility of miscomprehension and delay in a meditation on access and loss. Featuring a cinematic experience of Los Angeles rarely seen—or heard—before, and incorporating open captions as a rich narrative space, O’Daniel’s work is profound in its prompt for (hearing) audiences to tune in differently.
Alison O’Daniel will be in conversation with Film + Digital Media Associate Professor Anna Friz following the screening
event co-sponsored by Porter College
LISTENING AS FILMMAKING
[WORKSHOP WITH ALISON O’DANIEL]
Tuesday April 18, 1:30 – 4:30 PM / Communications 139
Alison O’Daniel is a d/Deaf visual artist and filmmaker who builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary that reveals (or proposes) a politics of sound that exceeds the auditory. O’Daniel’s film ‘The Tuba Thieves’ had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and is currently on the film festival circuit. O’Daniel is a United States Artist 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and is an Assistant Professor of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
She has received grants from Ford Foundation; Sundance; Creative Capital; Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation; and others. She has attended residencies at the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio Program; Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
She has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Centro Centro, Madrid, Spain; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Art in General, New York; Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France; Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha.