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Interview: Theo Anthony on All Light, Everywhere and Undermining Authority

Anthony grounds discussion of body camera footage within discussions about the link between image-making, weaponization, and power.

Theo Anthony
Photo: Super LTD

“Every film is a documentary about its own making,” Jacques Rivette once observed. Most films make viewers at least squint to prove him right. Few embed their very process of inquisition and exploration into the very fabric of their DNA quite like Theo Anthony’s second feature-length documentary, All Light, Everywhere. The film, which premiered at this year’s Sundance, is so confident that it dares to close with glimpses of a story thread jettisoned from its main body. It’s a decision in keeping with the filmmaker’s larger goal of undermining notions of authority and infallibility often implicit in nonfiction cinema.

Anthony’s essay films interrogate the surface-level questions raised by their topics: rat infestation in Rat Film, tennis’s computer-vision system of instant review in the ESPN 30 for 30 short Subject to Review, police body cameras in All Light, Everywhere. His intellectual excavations uncover the broader implications that people haven’t, or likely just won’t, confront by choosing to address only the latest symptomatic flair-ups of chronic societal conditions. Anthony grounds discussion of body camera footage within centuries-old discussions about the link between image-making, weaponization, and power. The film is equally comfortable at pursuing this discourse by touring a body camera manufacturer’s facility, sitting in on a tense Baltimore community meeting where residents push back against being covertly surveilled, or taking a discursive detour into the history of photography.

I spoke with Anthony over Zoom prior to the theatrical opening of All Light, Everywhere. Our conversation touched on how he decided what to include in the film, why he’s become increasingly visible within his own work, and how America’s post-George Floyd racial reckoning affects the way he thinks about the issues in the film now.

You use the epilogue to briefly provide a glimpse of an abandoned thread about a group of black students in a high school media production class that didn’t make the main narrative. How did you land on deciding to leave in the footage, highlighting something that most filmmakers would just leave on the cutting room floor?

From the start, I knew that we were investigating this particularly violent thread of image-making, and I thought that it was really important to acknowledge the existence of other histories and methods. Obviously, cameras do a lot of good things in the world too. I thought it would be this really great space to have the students be generating their own worlds. It’s a space of possibility, and it was always supposed to be a place where you see students actually figuring out their own representation that was in contrast to a particular criminalized or violent use of these tools. We were with them, and we were helping them with their projects as well. They were taking part in the film, and it’s obviously really important that they weren’t working with us just for the sake of the film. We were lending our equipment, we were teaching workshops with them, we were hiring them, in some cases, to work on the film.

But we got to a point with the edit where there were these moments of pure joy and possibility, within this film that spoke to this history of violence and the ways in which these tools get used at an institutional level to criminalize people. And not just people—let’s be really specific with it—but black and brown people in this country. Despite our intentions, despite all of our fancy editing and high conceptual conversations about different theories and ways that we could integrate this footage, we just realized when we place the students in this film in the edit coming after a shot of someone else holding a gun. You’re seeing them as a victim of this.

Do you think more documentarians should be forthright about what’s just outside the frame? I had a professor who always lamented that the majority of what gets published in any field is what works, yet we can also glean a lot from what doesn’t work as well.

I read somewhere that there should be more biographies of failure. I think that there’s a trend right now, which we’re definitely participants [in], of including ourselves in the frame. The predominant generational image is the selfie, right? I think that what maybe differentiates us from that is that I’m not necessarily the subject. Much in the same way that when you’re calibrating a scientific instrument or something like that, you have to take the instrument into account and the biases of the instrument. I’m trying to incorporate myself into the image as part of it. I think that there’s other ways to do it besides just your own visual trace. There’s a lot of other creative ways of letting people know that someone is making this film. But I agree [about] understanding film not just for its successes but also for its failures. The French word for “essay” is [the verb] “to try.” Not to be like the etymology nerd here, but I like that idea of an essay film being about trying something. That, to me, is at the heart of it.

There’s a bit of a theme running through All Light, Everywhere and Subject to Review: that mechanizing humanity out of the act of observation can be dangerous in the sense of the false objectivity that it provides. Is reinserting yourself and making your involvement visible on screen a way to counter that?

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Absolutely. When I used the prior example [of calibrating a scientific instrument], I wasn’t trying to elevate the subjective practice of filmmaking to a scientific goal of objectivity. I think it’s the opposite of that. This idea of really embodying yourself in the tools and the process is actually really important. Way too often these tools exist as a way just to pull the curtains over the person operating it and, by virtue of doing that, elevate the tool to some sort of superhuman level of authoritative knowledge. I made Subject to Review in the middle of making All Light, Everywhere, but we always joke that Subject to Review was like a phantom limb or section within this film. I always consider them the same film, as I made them with the same team. Definitely introducing uncertainty back into these tools and devices is my larger aim. I think inserting myself is a way at reintroducing uncertainty.

As I watched your films, I noticed your physical presence growing a bit in each. Is that just a coincidence particular to the projects themselves or indicative of an evolution in your understanding of the way you appear in the films?

I’ve definitely noticed that. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. Like I said, I think there’s other ways to implicate yourself—implicate sounds so judgmental, like, you are implicated—but to make it known that you’re part of this organic process, I think there’s other ways to do that besides just showing yourself. When I was making a film like All Light, Everywhere that was so particular to these histories of visuality and the powers and the privileges that come along with that visuality, I thought that my presence was necessary. I don’t like it. Really, I almost wish I wasn’t even on camera right now! I just don’t like being on camera. For the projects that I’ve done, [my appearances] serve very particular functions, but I don’t think that it’s going to grow and grow necessarily. I’m interested in a lot of other stuff.

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Narration and voiceover play a crucial function in your films. How do you calibrate this authorial, explanatory presence in your work, and how did you settle on doling out some of the most important information in All Light, Everywhere through subtitles?

I’ve always been interested in using voiceover to subvert itself. Voiceover has always been a signifier of authority, that you should really listen to the person talking because they know what they’re talking about. You don’t see them, so you just trust them. I thought that was so emblematic of so many of these histories that I’m wanting to unpack. I’ve used voiceover in that very Brechtian way to say, “I’m a voiceover, I’m an actor hired to play this particular role.” And then with the subtitles, I originally had three or four voices, and it was a mess. But I love footnotes, and I love these parallel threads that a footnote can have. Whether it’s citing someone or adding something that doesn’t fit into the flow of the main text, I love having this secondary text as an undercurrent. So, with the yellow footnotes, we had a rule that it was providing commentary for stuff outside the frame. The voice was speaking to what was in the frame, and the subtitles were a director’s commentary providing facts and figures outside the frame. It was our way of messing with footnotes in a film and seeing what worked. I like the idea that you have these different voices, and no one is definitive. In fact, their dual nature only serves to kind of undermine the authority of the other.

I was particularly fascinated by the section in the film where you appear to reopen some minimized browser tabs and play some Axon corporate videos over filmed footage. How did you approach and develop this desktop computer aesthetic, and why was it important to work into the film?

I’m fascinated by the way we experience information. When I’m speaking to young people who are connected with my work but don’t have experience with experimental film history, I think that the reason they connect with it is because it feels like being on the internet a little bit. I really want to capture that feeling of going from video to text to your phone to a text from your mom to an email. There are all these things happening at once, and I actually think that there’s something really radical about that…but it’s also so familiar. If you look at it in that light, and the way in which most documentaries present information, it feels really belittling to audiences. We have such an incredible visual literacy and an ability to understand multiple threads, multiple points of view, and context. This sort of algorithmic tendency to reduce these streams of information to someone wide and centered, they have the ring lights in their eyes, they’re talking—come on, there’s so much more interesting ways of presenting information! I’m just trying to capture that experience. There was a point where I was like, “Well, how do I transition from this scene to this scene?” And I was on my desktop, I was like, “Wait, why don’t I just present it as I’m doing it right now and be honest to that process?”

The credits end with a bibliography, and I took note of some of the sources—equal parts political, sociological, and aesthetic. Even if not as explicitly influential, were there any pieces of film theory that were influential in the back of your head as you’re interrogating the very nature of image-making?

It’s funny, I didn’t actually take those film theory classes. I’m assembling this Frankenstein syllabus always whenever I start a new project. There’s been so much written about the idea of the camera and the gun. Susan Sontag and Paul Virilio have written extensively about that. I have a hard time just saying “film theory” because I actually try to avoid film theory. I’m way more inspired by machine learning or the way in which light and space is visualized, that stuff is way more interesting to me. If you look at a lot of the sources, there’s these postcolonial writers like Édouard Glissant whose essays were really crucial for structuring this film. For someone who makes films for a living, I have not a whole lot of film theory references. I think the more important things have come from other areas of my life.

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There are already plenty people making films who’ve done all the film theory research!

That’s how I feel! They can probably say it a lot better than I can.

We’ve seen these moments in history where technological breakthroughs seem to herald the furthering of societal development, and there’s a bit of narration from Subject to Review that winks at this false promise: “Progress will continue its campaign against imperfection.” But these moments of great optimism are often halted by, say, the Nazis using automation and technology to perpetuate genocide. Do you think we’re headed for—or already experienced—another huge bust from this recent boom?

I think, if anything, we’re understanding that our world is far more complex and connected than we could ever imagine. The optimist in me thinks that we’re moving toward a world that seems alive again and almost enchanted with that connection. If we’re going to have any viable path forward, not just at the climate level but even just at a local organizing level, we’re gonna have to understand that our societies are always in conversation with both human and non-human participants. I think that’s an area of study that’s been suppressed by mostly colonial histories that have been championed as the be-all, end-all, which, time and time again, has been proven to be insufficient at explaining the world that we live in. We don’t live in a Newtonian, mechanical universe. That’s just a particular description of our universe that works at very particular scales. There’s a lot of really cool things that are embracing this complexity and looking for deeper patterns and areas of connection. A lot of it is just restating ideas and traditions that indigenous and colonized people have been saying forever. There’s such a resurgence in these ideas that I do find exciting.

The push and pull between the camera as a weapon and a tool for justice is a big theme of your work, and here we are a year following George Floyd’s death, the fallout from which you’ve mentioned really impacted the shape of the film. In this one instance, the civilian video held more sway than the body camera footage. Have your feelings changed at all about which role of the camera holds more sway?

I think I’ve come to understand that there’s a much larger question that needs to be asked before we get into the particularities of body cameras. I think that it’s just really important to say, in the spirit of complexity, that every town and jurisdiction is different, every way that communities and institutions interact is different. Those really have to be figured out at a local level with some guidance from, God forbid, our people in office at the federal level. I think that before we get to the level of “do we want body cameras or not,” which I have my own feelings about, there’s a much bigger question that needs to be asked. Does policing, in the manner that it has functioned for the last 150 years, need to be changed? If so, what needs to be done? Like body cameras, very often, are a way of not changing the way that policing functions, but rather to give police new tools, new ways of obfuscating evidence and accountability. Way more often than not, like by 9:1 actually, their use is against civilians and not to prosecute police. There’s just a much bigger conversation that needs to be had, and that has to do with budgeting, police union contracts, and a whole lot of other things. My feelings about that have changed, but always whenever I’m asked that question, I bring it back to the much larger question: How should policing work in America right now? And that’s a very broad question.

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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