If the inner lives of our parents can sometimes feel as unknowable as a black box, filmmaker Alison Tavel can point to an actual black box as one of the few physical tethers she has to her late father.
That would be the Resynator, a synthesizer prototype Don Tavel invented in the early Eighties, a few years before he died suddenly in a car crash when Alison was only 10 weeks old. In opening narration – directed at her father, her first words are “Dear Don” – Tavel details a childhood that was happy but missing only the most surface level knowledge of the father she never knew.
In her twenties she gets her hands on the Resynator prototype, gathering dust for decades at his mother’s house. Chattily, the chyron reads “Grandma Kitty’s attic” – an important reminder to the audience that Alison is not just documentarian but its explicit point-of-view and its heroine; indeed, her narrative presence is constant, in front of the camera and in the narration, always in conversation with her father, as she learns more about the Resynator, gets it working again, and learns in interviews with family and friends that Don was a far more complicated figure than she had been raised to believe.
Enlivened with animated segments by Danny Madden that demystify the Resynator and add emotional resonance, Resynator is compelling throughout. It hits dual pleasure centers for analog synth nerds – I won’t spoil the roster of musicians who pop up to excitedly play with the long-dormant synth – and fans of family mystery docs, the kind that onion-peel reveal new information about the past. Occasionally those reveals whiff of staginess, times when my inner cynic wondered if some of the more vulnerable moments on screen felt a touch performative, the narration too intent on packaging catharsis.
That isn’t too say Resynator isn’t heartfelt – it’s bursting with heart, and genuinely moving in its improbable journey to close the distance between the dead and the living. That black box, turns out, has much to share.
Resynator
Documentary Feature Competition, World Premiere
Wednesday, March 13, 6pm, Rollins TheatreSaturday, March 16, noon, AFS Cinema
Catch up with all of The Austin Chronicle‘s SXSW 2024 coverage.
This article appears in March 8 • 2024.
