Mark Reviews Movies: ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 3, 2021

We don't typically think about what's outside the frame of a movie or a photograph, because, if it mattered to the image, it would be inside the frame. All Light, Everywhere wants us to consider what we don't see when we're looking at a piece of media, especially as modern technology is capturing more and more of life as visual data—stored and analyzed and translated into algorithms, uploaded and processed and used as evidence, shot from high in the sky and detecting patterns and hidden from the public. As government entities and private corporations start and continue watching us more, it's more important than ever to understand that the frame of an image establishes a narrative, and that narrative may not be the whole story.

Director Theo Anthony's film is an intelligent, piercing, and free-flowing act of contemplation. The subject is primarily surveillance, as it is currently being used and could be used in the future. The main thrust of the narrative is the increasing use of body cameras by police departments—a move that, on the surface, seems like a fairly obvious improvement in holding law enforcement, as sworn servants of the public acting on their behalf, accountable.

Anthony isn't here to say this fairly recent development is wrong or a mistake. The filmmaker just wants us to understand the unintended consequences and potential downfalls of the practice. Surveillance, either in terms of police body cameras or—as we see in another major example—in terms of constant video monitoring by airplane, has become a business.

We get a tour of the company that provides the body cameras to police department throughout the country—such as the one in Baltimore, where Anthony observes a training session on the proper usage of the cameras. The head of the company, now called Axon (after changing its name, since it was once named after the "less-lethal" electroshock weapon it still produces), stops to listen to his favorite sound on the factory floor. A conveyor belt moves, and he sees that as an economy. Every piece of material that goes into making these cameras is taxed. All of these people have jobs. As people and governments call for more accountability in policing, the demand increases, and the belt keeps moving.

We should, of course, be at least slightly suspicious when someone puts such matters of the law, justice, and life or death into such impersonal financial terms. It doesn't help that the first thing the company head thinks of when it comes to tax spending is tanks, but that's another story.

We definitely should be suspicious as Anthony's tour includes multiple blacked-out windows (particularly after the guy giving the tour insists that "transparency" is one of the company's core values), a group of people trying to teach an artificial intelligence how to interpret the video being uploaded to the company's servers from across the country, and promotional videos of the company's plans for the future. In that promo material, everything—from the cameras, to holsters, to the weapons, to cars, to drones—is interconnected. All of those cameras, though, are only looking in one direction, and it's not toward the people who are meant to be held accountable by this technology. What story isn't being told, before the camera saves footage (a process that's activated manually) or outside the wide-angle—and, hence, distorted—frame?

While it's about today's technology, Anthony's documentary doesn't just show us what's happening now. It takes us back in time, too, back to the days of the 19th century, when Venus passed by the sun in a rare astronomical occurrence. Scientists around the world wanted to develop a method to accurately capture the transit with cameras, and one experiment resulted in what's considered to be the first motion picture ever produced—decades before Auguste and Louis Lumière developed their movie camera. The design of that earlier camera, by the way, was inspired by the Gatling gun (Our narrator, voiced by Keaver Brenai, informs us that the automatic weapon, first used during the Civil War, was meant to reduce casualties—as photographs of dead soldiers fill the screen). A later, hand-held creation by another scientist was dubbed "the rifle camera."

Today, a company that began by making weapons is now selling cameras to police departments throughout the United States. A camera may not be a weapon, but what it sees—and what it doesn't see—can create a narrative that might as well be a weapon.

It's an undeniable pattern of history—one of many that Anthony calls attention to, without hammering the point too much. Another pattern is the collection of data for accused criminals, first developed in France and adopted—and still used—throughout the world (The "booking" process, basically, of mugshots and written descriptions). Some people believed they could use those photographs to find physiological patterns that could predict whether or not someone would become a criminal. That same man became a pioneer of eugenics.

Now, even more visual data is being collected, collated, and considered by humans and advanced computers. What conclusions will these people or machines draw from all of that information?

Anthony doesn't provide answers, because there aren't any (A public meeting about 24-hour airplane surveillance over Baltimore offers a few suggestions for accountability, although one doubts anyone involved in the project is actually listening). All Light, Everywhere simply wants us to be aware of these issues and, hopefully, find ways to make sure the watchers are watched with as much scrutiny, if not more.

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