I’ve been a fan of creative captions for years now.
I’m talking about stuff like Christine Sun Kim’s Close Readings (see here) or Closer Captions (here), which an old friend just emailed to me this past week. (Woo, I love it when various friends find art or writing that I already enjoy!)
These captions do a lot of conceptual work. They’re specifically deaf appropriations of sound, but also of written text. They reveal how captions can be far more than “standard” accessibility tools. They’re often cheeky and subversive. And they can draw attention to the specific perspectives, the creative decisions, the translations and mistranslations and omissions, that go into captioning anything. (This gets loaded real fast.)
Innovative captions are just one feature of the experimental art film The Tuba Thieves, now streaming on PBS Independent Lens (through August). I picked up some fun freelance work with PBS/ITVS for this film, and now that it’s freely available online I’m writing a brief note to say — go watch it!
The Tuba Thieves is such a concept-driven film — a reflective experience, really, about how we make sense of the world. It’s about sound and its absence, even its irrelevance, yet also about its presence in different environments and across different senses and for different people. And it’s also about sight and paying attention and translating information from one sense to another. Among other things, I’d call it an extended meditation on subjectivity. (No, it’s not really about tubas. Or is it?)
I had the real pleasure of interviewing the director of this film for the PBS Independent Lens blog this week, so feel free to check out that conversation here if you’re interested.
Alison O’Daniel is brilliant and says so many things so well. I learned so much from talking to her. And I especially recommend this interview for her sharp reflections on the cultural value attached to filmmaking and cinematic storytelling, especially in relationship to “mainstream Hollywood” and the whole ongoing “representation in film/storytelling” discussion. Whew. We need more conversations like this one.
If you decide to watch this film, and then if you’d like to read/learn/think/discuss more, you can also check out the engagement guide I wrote here. Props to the filmmakers for all their creative efforts, and also to the entire Independent Lens team for pulling this guide together.
Here’s to more innovative forms of storytelling — further reflections and responses welcome in the comments!