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.”