Alison O’Daniel: Are You Listening?
Since March 2024, the Walker has hosted artist Alison O’Daniel for a cinema residency to consider the question: What does a d/Deaf cinema sound like? As a d/Deaf/hard of hearing artist, O’Daniel moves across film, sculpture, and performance to investigate how we hear, experience, and understand sound.
Spanning multiple engagements over the residency period, O’Daniel’s residency activates the Walker Cinema as a space to think about film and its relationship to d/Deafness and accessibility.
For her final residency program in June 2025, a pair of screenings extends from O’Daniel’s current research into sound as a weapon or as a mechanism of control. The first screening presents A Disaster, a working document toward O’Daniel’s debut feature film The Tuba Thieves, which considers these themes via appropriated soundtracks to disaster movies. As a complement, O’Daniel will introduce a screening of Peter Weir’s 1977 film The Last Wave, inviting audiences to experience one of the artist’s favorite disaster films while we reconsider how we see and hear disaster in film.
A Disaster by Alison O’Daniel
Fri, Jun 13, 7 pm
Walker Cinema
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors, free for students)
Alison O’Daniel’s latest project grows out of research into the weaponization of sound, such as the phenomenon targeting North American government officials known as Havana syndrome, or the ways high-frequency sounds and music are used to discourage loitering. For this screening, O’Daniel will present an interstitial film project that builds toward her next feature. Using the soundtracks of disaster movies as material, A Disaster is an almost entirely imageless film; comprised of sound and text, it is centered on the physical comprehension of subsonic frequencies, tactile sound, and how experiences of sonic violence mirror the relentless ubiquity of ableism. 2025, US, DCP, 60 min.
A conversation between O’Daniel and Evan Calder Williams, associate professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, follows the screening.
This film is screened with open captions. The introduction and discussion will have American Sign Language interpretation.
A Disaster is commissioned by the Walker with support provided by Lois and John Rogers.
The Last Wave by Peter Weir
Sat, Jun 14, 7 pm
Walker Cinema
$15 ($12 Walker members, seniors, and students)
Richard Chamberlain stars as David Burton, an Australian tax lawyer representing a group of Aboriginal men accused of murder. The men insist on their innocence, while Burton suspects otherwise. When one of the incarcerated men (legendary Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil) appears to Burton in a dream, his quest to gather the legal facts takes a turn into a world of dreams, tribal prophecy, and apocalyptic premonitions. Set amid a backdrop of cataclysmic storms, Weir’s film is not simply a murder mystery; instead, it’s a nuanced exploration of the schism between settler society and Aboriginal Australia. 1977, Australia, 35mm, 106 min.
Filmmaker, artist, and series curator Alison O’Daniel will introduce the film.
This film is screened with open captions. The introduction will have American Sign Language interpretation.