Review: All Light, Everywhere Is a Head-Spinning Exploration of the Limits of Sight

Theo Anthony’s film is a playful, enraging, free-associative cine-essay that both expands and eats itself alive as it proceeds.

All Light, Everywhere
Photo: Super LTD

Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere is a playful, enraging, free-associative cine-essay that both expands and eats itself alive as it proceeds. It opens with an unnerving sequence that culminates in a close-up of a human eye. The eye belongs to Anthony, as he turns the camera on himself to reveal the optic nerve, which subtitles inform us connects the eye to the brain yet itself carries no visual information. Or, per the film: “At the exact point where the world meets the seeing of the world, we’re blind.” This declaration, coupled with the hallucinatory shots of Anthony’s eye, are startling in their directness and intimacy. In a matter of seconds, Anthony establishes his governing intentions, namely to indict illusions of objectivism associated with sight, including his own as the maker of this film.

The blind spots—the elisions and distortions that come with framing, recording, or merely seeing—that particularly obsess Anthony concern those in the realm of surveillance technology. All Light, Everywhere follows several strands that are united by two themes: the encroachment of surveillance hardware and software into everyday life, and the fact that such developments are as riven with racist, classist biases as any other element of society. Two of the strands tackle the rise of body cameras in law enforcement from complementing angles, from the point of view of the Arizona-based company Axon Enterprise, which manufactures the Taser and has a near monopoly on body camera technology, and from that of Baltimore police officers taking a training seminar on how to use the cameras in the field. In each strand, chilling dystopian euphemisms are used (such as “non-lethal weapons”) to justify a new form of justice-as-commodity. Certain scenes, particularly with Axon exec Steve Tuttle pridefully, sometimes oxymoronically promoting various cameras and weapons, suggest that the brutal corporate satire of Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop is close to reaching actual fruition.

An irony becomes evident early on in All Light, Everywhere, as the surveillance technology that’s being developed for law enforcement suggests a form of capitalism as ass-covering. The ghosts of so many young black people killed by police haunt this film—Freddie Gray is explicitly mentioned at one point—and the cameras appear to be less an aid for helping citizens than a new form of manipulatable alibi for cops. The cameras are worn on officers’ chests and, as Anthony vividly demonstrates, utilize a wide-angle lens that distorts its field of vision, making human movement appear sharper and more aggressive than it may be in reality. This footage is then uploaded into a software program that’s guarded by intellectual property laws, and therefore subject to little government scrutiny. This footage can also allow the officers to refresh their memories, or, by implication, reframe a story.

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Anthony is aware that the money being pumped into these innovations could be spent to improve the communities being policed, which is to say that these surveillance devices epitomize yet again the ongoing debate regarding the respective roles of social service and law enforcement in America. Social service is advocated, wrenchingly, by Baltimore citizens in the film’s third strand, in which Ross McNutt, the founder of Persistent Surveillance Systems, attempts to sell the notion of allowing his drone hardware to fly over the city, rendering a Google Earth-style recording of neighborhoods from a God’s-eye view.

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Astonishingly, McNutt’s recording was taking place without even the mayor’s permission and was eventually shuttered, and he now finds himself going to community meetings to sell his covert project. The citizens at the meetings are almost entirely black, and many of them wonder why the surveillance is occurring primarily in low-income neighborhoods of color. McNutt, who’s white, doesn’t have an answer for that, though Anthony doesn’t score easy points on a man who’s allowing his tech obsessions to override common concerns. In fact, Anthony also films citizens who support the technology, and he also shows himself filming the meetings—rhyming his invasion of privacy with McNutt’s.

As fascinating as these various strands are in their own right, All Light, Everywhere is cumulatively extraordinary for its open-mindedness and sense of poetry. This isn’t a film with a reductive political ax to grind. Anthony is justifiably skeptical of our surveillance culture, yet he also sees the wonder of it and empathizes with people on all places on the social ladder and on all sides of various volatile subjects. Particularly notable is the carefulness with which he films the (also mostly black) police in the training seminar, capturing their curiosity and trepidation in a matter of seconds, refusing to shirk away from their humanity.

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Filming the police, Anthony reveals how these cameras can disserve them as well as everyone else, turning them, in the public eye, into a kind of militarized machine. This association is deepened by the history Anthony offers of the developments of cameras and of cinema, which have always been linked to weaponry, as early cameras were shaped like guns (hence the photographic term “shot”), and recording and magnifying technology was quickly utilized to refine military warfare. Not even these montages are routine, as they’re inflamed with Anthony’s obsessiveness—his determination to divine the corruptibility of sight and the essential link between violence and surveillance as mutual actions of war—for dominion. (There’s even a short tutorial on eugenics, the deeply racist pseudo-science that’s connected here, devastatingly, to the broadly black features of a law enforcement practice dummy.)

Filmmaking, especially of the nonfiction variety, is itself a form of surveillance, and it can be utilized as an instrument of both expression and investigation—two modes that Anthony blends here with seeming effortlessness. There’s especially a sense of awe in the fourth, nearly abstract strand, which is composed primarily of close-ups of people’s faces as their responses to various media stimuli is measured with headgear. These faces, accompanied by Dan Deacon’s poignant, rapturous trance-out of a score, appear to be in a meditative bliss, suggesting that technology is at its base a drug—a notion that Steven Spielberg mined in his similarly themed and similarly visionary Minority Report.

All Light, Everywhere captures many paradoxes and biases of sight and photography, from the hellish to the transcendent, even deconstructing itself along the way to reveal its own omissions and selective emphases. Besides Anthony’s consistent presence in the film, in which he’s shown manipulating performances, shots, and editing rhythms, subtitled information and a ruminative, resonantly robotic narration by Keaver Brenai suggest alternate, haunting, almost ephemeral points of view, as if the film is at war with itself as an embodiment of all its critiques. All Light, Everywhere is head-spinning, serving as proof, in the tradition of Frederick Wiseman and Robert Greene’s cinema, that political works can also be beautiful.

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Score: 
 Director: Theo Anthony  Distributor: Super LTD  Running Time: 105 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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