All Light, Everywhere

"All Light, Everywhere" is not a journalistic exploration of a vital issue, but more of a moony rumination celebrating the unknowable.

Descriptions for “All Light, Everywhere” call it a far-ranging exploration of human perception as seen through camera lenses. Personally I wished it had ranged less far. 

Director Theo Anthony’s documentary has the nut of a really powerful idea at its center. That is, the increased prevalence of the surveillance of human activity, in particular the use of police body cameras and aerial photography in bigger cities, gives us the impression of an objective, graspable reality that does not truly exist. 

To wit: just because a camera has recorded moving images and sound of an event does not guarantee an accurate reflection of what happened. Cameras are bound by their frames, so we do not see what happens beyond the borders of the lens. Microphones are poor at recording audio more than a few feet away. By pointing the camera one way, you are by definition excluding most of the visual world.

As the public debate about police use of force rages in parallel with renewed awareness about racial injustice, police cameras have been embraced as a panacea that, the film convincingly argues, it can never be. Just because a video recording of an encounter with law enforcement exists does not mean that police killings of suspects will cease or even diminish, or that we will stop arguing about whether deadly force was justified.

But “All Light” is not a journalistic exploration of a vital issue, instead more of a moony rumination celebrating the unknowable. 

It takes a step back — and then a bunch more — to make some kind of grand, abstract argument about how all of visual perception (light) is unreliable and constructed in our minds. It then relies on gimmicks to remind us that even this film is a construction defined not by its creation but how it is perceived.

It opens with a person (possibly the filmmaker) setting up an arresting camera shot through their own eyeball to reveal the optic nerve, which the deliberately flat yet vaguely hostile narration reminds us sees nothing, only sending electrical signals to the mind for assembly into a facsimile of the visual realm.

“The brain invents a world to fill the hole at the center of it,” the narrator intones. She does much of this sort of intoning, as the documentary jumps back and forth between a bunch of different pieces. 

There is a scientific experiment where subjects are wired up so we can see how they’re looking at images. A long dissertation on the origins of moving image cameras developed in the 1800s by astronomers wanting to measure phenomenon such as the Black Drop Effect, devices that were technologically similar to weaponry. A tour of their offices and factory by the CEO of Axon International, the company that dominates the market of both police bodycams and the Taser, a (usually) non-lethal weapon. Airplane-based sky monitoring of Baltimore that was rolled out after the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, canceled under protest but now under consideration again.

The filmmakers also include themselves, or parts of themselves, in the act of making this documentary. For instance, at Axon we’ll see what the cameraman shot of a demonstration of the company’s equipment, then see the same scene from the perspective of one of those cameras, showing the filmmaking making the film.

One of the precepts the movie has at its core is one central to both scientists and filmmakers: watching something or someone changes how it behaves. So there is not only the subjective effect of how people or cameras, both imperfect, perceive the world differently but also that the world is altered because it is seen.

“The act of observation obscures the observation,” is how the narrator puts it. 

This takes me back to a lot of film theory I studied at NYU a million years ago, very esoteric stuff claiming there is no single reality, only how it is perceived, and these simulacra are laid over top of the original in endless layers of obscured existence.

Again, our narrator: “These machines do not reproduce the world, they produce new worlds.”

Oh… c’mon. Human perception and memory are notoriously inaccurate, and the film’s assertion is correct that cameras do not capture the totality of objective reality, only limited slices of it. We are falling into a trap as a society where video is so prevalent we think that it is the beginning and end of understanding an event.

But it’s an equally dangerous trap to think that cameras are the liars and not the people who create or operate them. A misleading piece of video does not mean the truth doesn’t exist. Just because people will have different interpretations or recollections of, say, a police shooting, does not mean they all have equal value.

We are already seeing that the presence of video from a police bodycam will not prevent people from falling into the same predictable camps, particularly when filtered through red-hot racial and political framings. 

The result is a rather strange documentary, one that is not hard-eyed and cynical — something I could’ve embraced, even if I disagreed with its conclusions — but an odd, dreamy experience in which we’re repeatedly instructed not to believe what we see.

On a number of occasions we’ll be watching some footage, and we’ll suddenly switch to a computer screen with various windows, one of which was the scene we were just watching, and we realize we are witnessing the editing process of the movie as we watch it.

The experience is like seeing a magician performing tricks while showing you how he does them. It is simultaneously an intriguing and self-defeating exercise.

“All Light, Everywhere” continues its mix of insight and misdirection through the closing credits, where the filmmakers reveal they had partnered with a class of student filmmakers whose footage was supposed to form an integral part of this documentary — but was cut out because they felt it fell too far outside the frame of what they were focusing on.

A little more focus, and a lot tighter frame, was exactly what this film needed. Or course, that’s just my perception…