All Light, Everywhere (2021)
dir. Theo Anthony
Rated: N/A
image: ©2021 Super LTD
The one-line synopsis for director Theo Anthony’s new documentary, All Light, Everywhere, says everything and nothing all at once. The movie “explore[s] issues of subjective perception and fallibility in both human and technological modes of surveillance.” That description is slippery because All Light, Everywhere is about that idea, how humans see things, but it’s explored in a hundred different ways. Anthony takes the epistemological method of dialectics – presenting opposing points-of-view of a topic as a way to uncover its truths – to new heights with his film.
Dialectical montage, the editing technique pioneered in early Soviet silent cinema by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, in which two contradictory images are juxtaposed in order to create a new, third meaning, is used to soaring effect in All Light. It doesn’t quite all hang together; by the picture’s last passage, I got the feeling that Anthony might have been ultimately overwhelmed by his material. His film is, overall, an exhilarating experience. It implicates the very act of its own creation in its exploration of the flaws of human observation. All Light, Everywhere destroys the conventional wisdom that “seeing is believing.”
At the heart of the film is the increasing use by American police departments of body cameras to document officers’ interactions with the public. The civilian population has been sold on the idea, and it seems objectively true, that body cameras present an exact, unbiased document of any given event. The use of body cameras was encouraged by justice activists as a way to introduce accountability and transparency in the state’s use of force against its citizens.
Anthony blows all that up over the course of the film. One of the ways he does that is by interviewing Steve Tuttle, the spokesperson for Axon International, a security company that manufactures most of the body cameras used by police in the U.S., as well as other “non-lethal” law enforcement items like stun guns. (I use the quotes around non-lethal because weapons like stun guns can and do kill people by triggering adverse events like heart attacks.)
Axon has an 85% market share of body camera sales to the police. We get a hint that a body camera might not be the objective record we assume it is when Tuttle tells us that the cameras are calibrated to give us as close an approximation as possible to what the officer who is wearing it sees. In a dark alley, for example, the camera could be adjusted, through night-vision enhancement, to be able to tell if a suspect is holding a gun or a wallet, even if the cop wearing it wouldn’t be able to distinguish that difference.
Making cameras see that way was a huge mistake of Axon’s early competitors, Tuttle says. The police who use the cameras want a record of what the cop sees, not what actually happened. Anthony never has to expressly say it (although Tuttle practically does), but the implication is clear: the police are interested in a record that will help exonerate an officer on trial, not any sort of ultimate truth.
Not that ultimate truth is ever really possible, anyway, as Anthony goes about demonstrating throughout All Light. The film opens with a passage about how the human optic nerve, which transmits the electrical signals that the brain interprets as sight, is itself a blind spot. We never actually see anything; our brain must create a world to fill the gap of this blind spot.
The film builds upon that thesis statement by exploring human attempts over hundreds of years to accurately measure the transit of Venus across the visible face of our sun. Anthony documents how no two astronomers could duplicate their data because the limits of human sight meant that every observation was slightly different. The very act of observation changes the thing being observed, as any quantum physicist could tell you.
Interspersed throughout these dialectical ideas is a history of the human attempt to take flawed human sight out of the equation. Anthony documents one early motion-photography example, considered by many to be the very first motion picture, and how it was created decades before the French Lumière brothers held their first Cinématographe film screenings.
These early cinematic cameras were inextricably linked to gun technology; one was even called a “photographic rifle.” (The unintended bloodshed caused by the invention of the Gatling gun during the American Civil War – the inventor thought it would save lives because he foolishly assumed that the automation of killing would mean less men would be required for battle – is tied to early photography in the movie.) Terminology, like “shooting” to describe exposing frames of film, grew naturally out of this association.
Of primary concern to All Light, Everywhere is who is doing the shooting, and who, subsequently, is being shot. Because, as the film says, every image has a frame, and someone – an active but often invisible someone – is deciding what is being left out of the image. Passages in the film about early attempts by criminologists to use photographs of criminals to identify and, improbably, predict who will commit crimes, bring the focus onto who is doing the watching and who is being watched.
Also included in All Light’s transcendently elliptical style – it’s easy to become mesmerized by Anthony’s images, especially when he cranks up composer Dan Deacon’s frightfully beautiful, occasionally cacophonous score – is the increasingly surveilled world in which we live.
The movie spends time with Ross McNutt, the president and founder of Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS). Dr. McNutt is convinced that he can dramatically reduce the crime rates of major American cities by using constant aerial surveillance, what he calls “Google Maps with TiVo.” McNutt’s pilot program is focused on Baltimore, Theo Anthony’s hometown. Using his system, law enforcement can rewind the images to track a suspect’s path leading up to a crime, in order to more easily apprehend them.
All Light, Everywhere makes the case through dialectical montage that because McNutt focuses PSS’s technology on “high crime” areas of the city, he is completely ignoring, or leaving out of the frame, other areas and populations. Power sets its agenda, as members of the community let McNutt know in community outreach meetings he holds in Baltimore. One man puts it more eloquently and incisively than I ever could: McNutt is using “crime as a bait” in order to get the citizens of Baltimore to acquiesce to constant, never-ending surveillance.
McNutt – who comes off in the documentary as a quiet, reserved mad scientist – attempts to sell his service on the merits of it being used in Iraq and Afghanistan to combat terrorism. It’s as if he sees America as an occupied state, and we should shower him with praise for the opportunity to be monitored as though we all (although, not really all of us) live in an occupied state. The idea is fairly horrifying.
The last sequence of All Light covers a film and television high school class, where Baltimore students produce their own half-hour television pilots. On-screen text narration tells us that this thread was originally to be the main focus of the film, but it was mostly thrown out once Anthony’s scope for the project grew wider.
The movie did at times overwhelm me with a sense that the filmmaker had so much to say that he was himself overwhelmed with the best way to say it. It’s hard for me to hold that against Anthony or his film, though. All Light, Everywhere is audacious, dense, thought-provoking stuff. It is one of the best documentary experiences of the year so far.
Why it got 4 stars:
I had a hard time deciding between four and four-and-a-half stars on this one. Anthony’s documentary is mesmerizing, engrossing, and tackles some huge issues. It didn’t exactly feel like he bit off more than he could chew, if I can use a hackneyed cliché, but it did feel like he maybe had too much material, and it slightly overwhelmed him. I’ll never feel disappointed in someone swinging for the fences, though, to use yet another cliché.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- It’s so telling when Ross McNutt pre-emptively, in apropos of nothing, says something very specific during one of his explanations to the film crew of how his system works. He says that because the cameras are so high above the city, you can’t tell what race a person is, you can only see their movements. Conveniently, he never mentions the demographics of the communities he’s proposing to surveil.
- Making Theo Anthony’s case for him, during one of the community outreach meetings with McNutt, someone makes the point that the documentary cameras being present probably caused some of the attendees to react differently than they otherwise would have. The mere act of observing something changes the thing being observed. Anthony must have been giddy when he heard that.
- At one point, the film mentions that because they have access to the body camera footage, officers involved in an incident that requires an investigation or a trial are able to look at it before being interviewed, so that they can align their statement with the video, effectively getting their story straight with the footage.
- There is no way Steve Tuttle has any awareness of how much of a tool he makes himself look like in this thing.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this via a screener link from the studio. As of this writing, All Light, Everywhere is only available in a very select number of theaters.