All Light, Everywhere

All Light, Everywhere

All Light, Everywhere by Theo Anthony is a feature-length essay film about the history of filmmaking and surveillance both objective and subjective. It could pass for a season’s worth of brainy nonfiction television packed into just over two hours, so stuffed with ideas and expressed in such noisy and oblique language that it can be difficult to track them all.

Here, as in his previous location-specific projects Rat Film and Subject to Review, the Baltimore based filmmaker tries to consider every cultural, technological and philosophical aspect of surveillance: how easily a supposedly objective, detached or logical tech can be manipulated or abused or withheld; how people’s biases, prejudices and cultural conditioning affect what they see when they look at data (whether that’s satellite images of inner-city neighborhoods or body camera footage of a police officer barking at a citizen).

It’s only one corner of an immense information warehouse. If All Light, Everywhere has any single argument or line of inquiry that it sustains for more than five minutes before chasing down another related thought for 10 minutes before jumping to something else entirely well, I’ll let you know if I figure out what it is. Anthony cuts among parallel story lines and historical anecdotes throughout: This structure crosscuts between different ways to frame the film thematic interests.

The name Freddie Gray comes up early on, and we keep thinking back on his fate as the movie goes along. Anthony contrasts the golly-gee excitement of executives-salesmen-spokesmen (they’re almost all white) in various companies within the surveillance industry against progressive watchdogs’ skepticism; past philosophers’ idealism with ethicists’ present day practicality; satellite perspective with ground truth; “urban” vs. “suburban” vs. “rural” vs. “natural”; citizens’ rights under law vs subjects’ treatment by cops; Black Baltimorians who refuse to serve merely as “subjects” in whatever plan these industries have cooked up to profit from them.

The most audacious conceptual gambit may be the narration, which starts off this way: “I am the blind spot of the eye through which the brain can infer an image” Unfortunately, it isn’t long before we realize that’s all we’re getting not a sleep-aid voiceover, exactly (though that too), but just plain old third-person “expert” narration like you’d find in any random BBC or PBS doc made 40 years ago.

It provides much-needed context that pictures and sounds alone cannot supply (ironic or is it?). And every once in a while it offers a delightfully gnomic aphorism, the sort of thing Godard might say (or type out onscreen) in a Goodbye to Language essay movie (“The act of observation obscures the observation,” etc.) or one inspired by him.

The movie works best when it sticks to one thing, whether that’s current affairs or history which gives context to present problems. For example, it touches on the relationship between film cameras and automatic weapons (which were invented around the same time early Zoetrope type devices were modelled on the Gatling gun) and the interchangeability of photographic and military language (both camera people and soldiers get targets in their sights and shoot them).

We also learn along the way about how motion picture technology came about through studying Venus’s movement around the sun; prison panopticon strategies intersected with Europe’s subjugation of nonwhite colonies; Darwinism, eugenics, and white supremacy are related; subjectivity versus objectivity when deciding what is authentic/true versus manufactured/false.

This is a powerful idea perhaps the most urgent line of inquiry in this film but never more than when Black Baltimoreans are having a community meeting with a representative from a company that wants to put more cameras in their neighborhood under the guise of crime prevention. It would be riveting if it weren’t so chopped up for crosscutting effect. It indicts itself.

The people in this room call out these filmmakers for not having any people of color on their crew (one says he knows several who could’ve participated); they ding one of the meeting sponsors, a Black clergyman, for not being crystal clear with them about how footage would be used in Anthony’s documentary. They blur the face of the most eloquent angry person in this room he’s Haitian, presumably brought into this project by Anthony but held at arm’s length because you don’t want to get sued; that decision deserves its own short.

Really, what this movie keeps coming back to is race as regards police work specifically Axon Technology (formerly Taser) out in Scottsdale that manufactures stun guns, body cameras and all manner of gadgets. A representative for Axon keeps inadvertently serving up metaphors and ironies on a silver platter; the film feasts. At one point he gives the crew a tour of a plant where they make body cameras and weapons.

He boasts that the open floor plan is a testament to his company’s belief in “transparency” and “candor.” Then he points to a black box area on the second floor, where researchers can block their picture-window view of the shop floor, so no one can see what they’re making. Later, we go inside the black box. He shows how the windows can be blotted out at the touch of a button. He does it over and over, beaming at how cool it is.

Obviously, none of these detours have a right answer at least two of them almost become narrative cul-de-sacs before the movie snaps back into the present. Credit Anthony (who wrote and edited as well as directed) and his cinematographer Corey Hughes for that; you leave thinking about bits of the film that seemed like cuttable digressions and undergraduate musings when you were watching it. As its own complete work, “All Light, Everywhere” has more problems than I can describe here. But as a gift-bag of discussion prompts? It’s hard to beat.

Another note on irony: Dan Deacon’s brilliant ambient synth score works some too. It creates a sinister undercurrent without resorting to obvious tactics or rather, in spite of them; it evokes naive high tech wonder in the manner of Vangelis’ score for the original “Blade Runner,” but those smiling men in ties who keep trying to sell us and the filmmakers on their wares have been put in charge of the soundtrack, and they’re trying to drown out our misgivings by putting us inside the headspace of a kid who thinks this stuff is just so fucking cool.

Sometimes it intensifies the film’s too much nesses in ways that aren’t helpful at all; when Anthony is taking what feels like hours to show us objects rolling through assembly lines while people look on from an observation room participating in some kind of eye movement study where suddenly a water glass and a fern levitate for no reason at all that I could make out and Deacon is going nuts on the synthesizers I feel like we’ve time-traveled back to 1979 and we’re experiencing grand-opening day at EPCOT Center in Disney World with some kids who got baked on the monorail platform on the way over.

But there’s something to be said for an aesthetic that takes possession of a wandering mind’s dynamics the way this one does. And if any takeaway resonates more than the others, it’s that the definition of objective truth depends on where you’re standing, what you’re looking at and what you decided to notice in the first place. Which means, of course, that somebody else could watch this movie and come out feeling like they’ve just seen a classic which takes a multifaceted subject and puts it in its viewfinder from every possible angle.

Watch All Light Everywhere For Free On Gomovies.