All Light, Everywhere

In college, I would often write sprawling essays that only nominally conformed to the “intro/thesis statement/support/conclusion” format, much to the chagrin of my professors. It was never enough to travel from A to B: The world was too large, too complex for such simplification. In order to write about something, I had to write about everything. I have since reined in that penchant for contextual detours (well, mostly anyway), which is why I have a particular affinity for filmmaker Theo Anthony. He is much more successful in using this approach to draw, from a wide and disparate range of historical and philosophical elements, a clear picture of his topic. With 2016’s Rat Film, it was using the eponymous rodent to discuss social experimentation and the segregation of his hometown of Baltimore. All Light, Everywhere, his latest film essay, uses the framework of surveillance technology to reveal the blind spots in our perception of the world, and the power structures that exploit them for their own agenda.

From the attempts to capture the Transit of Venus in the late 19th century and the integral role of firearm technology in the creation of the motion picture camera (thank you, Richard Gatling), to a grand tour of Axon International, the world’s leading manufacturer of body cameras and tasers for law enforcement, with forays into the early development of “talking pictures,” or mugshots, for photographic classification of criminals, which has evolved into massive databases of images and footage, where AIs detect recurring patterns to learn which actions should be implemented, All Light, Everywhere uncovers the limitations of trying to understand the natural order of the world and to predict the future behavior of complex systems. For those blind spots, beginning with the optic nerve, sending the brain impulses to invent the world we see, to the instruments we utilize that erase the the body behind the camera, and that, in the use of surveillance especially, are used as an extension of the state, the film reiterates that we are not reproducing the world, we are producing a new world. The act of observation obscures the observation, the act of seeing is an intervention into the world.

Throughout, Anthony uses metatextual subtitles and often pulls back on the production, using the film itself to convey the limitations and bias of the camera, for as the narrator explains, “every frame excludes a world beyond its edges.” Composer Dan Deacon returns to contribute a suitably haunting score, and the inclusion of “All of a Sudden” by Laraaji is the perfect endnote to this extraordinary and endlessly fascinating film. All Light, Everywhere’s roaming tangents always return to the heart (or the eye) of the matter, and that skill of orchestration is no mean feat. Believe me, I have many a prof’s margin notes to prove it.