SXSW 2024 Review: RESYNATOR, Revelatory Musical History Turns Surprisingly Personal

Rather amazing and completely fascinating, even if you don't have a particular interest in the archaeology of musical instruments.

Resynator
The film enjoys its world premiere tonight at SXSW 2024. It screens again on March 13 and March 16. Visit the film's official site for more information.

Alison Tavel never knew her father until she made a film about a musical instrument that he invented.

The Resynator, as Don Tavel called it, emerged in the 1970s, distinguishing itself from the popular (among professional and aspiring musicians) Minimoog synthesizers, which helped to spread electronic music to the masses. (Full disclosure: in 1979, I paid $600 for a Minimoog, which now sits abandoned in my closet.) The warm sound of analog synthesizers always appealed to me, so hearing about this documentary made me eager to watch it.

It turns out that the film is even better than I hoped. Fully occupied as a personal and stage assistant, touring with Grace Potter, young Alison Tavel was fully immersed in the world of music. Even though she lost her father (by blood) when she was just ten weeks old, she never felt any strong yearning to learn about him, since she had been raised in a loving household by her mother and stepfather.

Having heard stories about her father that took on nearly mythic proportions -- that he was an inventor and a musical genius, and knew world-famous musicians -- she decided to investigate what happened to him. Finding the original Resynator in a dusty box in her grandmother's attic, her curiosity steadily increases.

First, she just wants to see if she can get the thing to work. It looks like a plain black box, maybe like a modern stereo component; its insides are made of handmade circuit boards. She takes it to people who knew her father, worked with him, cursed at him, loved him, slowly creating a new impression of a man she never knew, the father that her grandmother doesn't want to talk about, the father that her mother separated from, the father with a brilliant imagination and boundless ambition who was felled by personal demons that friends and family members knew little about.

What emerges is an incomplete portrait, yet Alison Tavel's curiosity becomes something more, something that drives her to find out everything possible before everyone who knew her father passes off the scene. As she pushes to find out more, we also learn more about her, so that Resynator becomes a dual biography of both her father and herself.

What is it that inspires her? What is it that motivates her to travel all over the world to talk with people who knew her father? What is it that she hopes to discover? What will it tell her about herself?

Resynator saves eye-opening surprise connections for its concluding scenes, which almost feel unbelievable, and are definitely enthralling. By the time the film gets there, the viewer is fully wrapped up in the story, which is far more than how it modestly begins. It's a fabulous film.