Two From Sundance

A Still Small Voice and The Tuba Thieves

Watching

A Still Small Voice (2023)

Luke Lorentzen’s A Still Small Voice—for which he won the Sundance prize for best director—is set in Mt. Sinai hospital in New York mid-pandemic. The focus here isn’t on the people we generally consider frontline workers so much as what we might call the next-in-line workers: hospital chaplains, the folks who visit patients and their loved ones after and in between the people administering their primary medical care. Our point of entry to this world is Margaret (“Mati”), a young woman completing her residency in Mt. Sinai’s chaplaincy program under the supervision of Rev. David, a white man of unspecified denominational affiliation and stylishly thin-framed spectacles.

The movie is split between scenes of Mati working with patients¹, providing care and moral support and in one scene an impromptu baptism, and scenes of Mati and her fellow residents discussing the emotional toll of their labor and working together to find ways of replenishing themselves within their constricting circumstances. Though not spiritual himself, Lorentzen says he was inspired to take on this subject by his sister’s experience in this field. While the scenes with patients are at times moving in their own right, Lorentzen’s presence isn’t always seamless and sometimes even feels intrusive.² Generally I found the most impactful scenes to be the ones where there is more distance between Lorentzen’s camera and Mati’s patients, such as the opening shot of Mati attempting to communicate with a nonverbal bedridden man, which Lorentzen shoots from across the hall, and a scene where Mati grief-counsels an offscreen woman over the phone.

A Still Small Voice is at its best during the behind-the-scenes moments, where we start to understand the various legacies that inform the chaplaincy. In one meeting with her cohort, Mati traces her investment in this work and her call to the vocation of caretaking back to her grandparents’ experience at Auschwitz. She discloses her frustration with her religious tradition’s shortcomings and admits to feeling God’s absence more regularly than his presence. Nevertheless, she says there is something nourishing in her Judaism that she believes is worth preserving and sharing.

Alongside Mati’s story, we also see some of Rev. David’s perspective. Rev. David meets with his own supervisor, a woman some years his senior, over Zoom. In the sessions Lorentzen shows us, Rev. David expresses concern about the power he holds in the chaplaincy. While he doesn’t feel like he’s especially suited to the role of supervisor, he is determined not to replicate the bullying, abusive behaviors he experienced under previous supervisors when he was first a resident. Rev. David does not succeed entirely at escaping the patriarchal habits of his predecessors, but knowing that he is aware of the cycle he is trying to break is the source of a compelling dramatic irony whenever the camera returns to Mati’s side.

Mati only makes it to the end of her residency after a fight with Rev. David over an impossible work/life boundary question—whether to take a call after hours for a suicidal woman—invites the involvement of HR and a change of supervisors. By this point in the film, it’s clear that the nourishment Mati hopes her Jewish spirituality can provide to patients is not being returned to her in kind by the hospital. (In the brief glimpses Lorentzen gives us of Mati’s life outside the hospital, there’s no evidence that she’s connected to a spiritual community or practices that could restore her when facing down burnout.)

From the point of view of the hospital, the chaplains are laborers like any other (though probably much worse paid than the nurses and psychologists on staff). What matters to the institution is that the chaplains are in just good enough emotional condition to return to work the next day, not that they might have spiritual vocations requiring a different kind of support. The psychoanalytic tools the residents are given to process their experiences in group sessions and supervisory meetings might be sufficient for keeping the trains running; the existential questions that Mati is confronting beg for a richer alternative.

The Tuba Thieves (2023)

The immediate point of departure for Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves is a series of unsolved thefts of tubas from Los Angeles high schools that happened in the early 2010s. The proper subject of the film, however, is sound, specifically as it relates to deafness and cinema. The film is a series of vignettes, some more engaging than others, with a troupe of deaf and hard of hearing actors serving as anchors in between trips down deaf history (e.g. a visit to San Francisco’s Deaf Club), a reenactment of the world premiere of John Cage’s “4’33” at Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, NY, and insert shots of LA high school marquee signs broadcasting ominous messages (“NOT ALL IS LOST…ALL IS LOST”).

The defining aesthetic element of The Tuba Thieves is its captioning. The entire movie is captioned but in frequently inventive ways. Captions change color, fade in and out at different speeds, and appear in unconventional parts of the frame. It’s both an attempt at describing the subjective qualities of sound and also mapping its position, intensity, layers, and duration. At times I found myself paying more attention to the captions than to anything else onscreen, almost to the point of trying to judge their accuracy relative to my own perceptions of the corresponding sounds. It’s amazing how much meaning a well-placed ellipses can add to plainly descriptive words (see the image above).

Compared with last year’s Oscar-winning Sundance darling CODA, where a deaf cast populate a hearing actress’s journey of self-realization as quirky supporting characters, The Tuba Thieves is practically a Godard film. As with the New Wave titan’s best work, there’s a pleasurableness to the film’s constant experimentation, though its looseness means it never really coheres into anything like a thesis beyond “accessibility need not be where creativity goes to die.” That’s fine as it is, and many of the ways that the deaf cast get to express themselves onscreen are valuable in their own right (highlights for me included a poetry recitation and a signed conversation about mushroom reproduction).

Frustratingly, O’Daniel introduces plenty of other politically interesting material but leaves most of it thematically undeveloped. In an early scene, an adult character named Nature Boy protests in the middle of a hearing exam because the content has not changed since he was three years old. The interstitial shots between major set pieces highlight the ways that jet planes and other products of industrialization have deprived the commons of silence while contributing, no doubt, to more hearing loss among more people. And the framing device of the tuba thefts picks up additional resonance from an insert of a radio program discussing the closure of music programs in public LA schools.

As I acclimated to the movie’s formal gambits, I started waiting for the film to arrive at some sort of conclusion about the way resource distribution shapes the sensory worlds of the deaf and the hearing alike. O’Daniel opts for a more straightforward politics of representation, which is a shame given the wealth of material she’s brought to the surface for further exploration.

1. In the post-screening Q&A, Mati clarified that the filmmakers sought and received informed consent from all of the hospital patients featured in the final cut of the film.

2. There’s a shot late in the film where a woman whose stillborn child Mati has just baptized gives a fleeting look at the camera that reads as sheepish annoyance. Why leave this in? It’s a moment that would seem to indicate some self-criticism on the part of the director, but the remaining scenes with patients are played straight.