All Light, Everywhere (Theo Anthony, 2021) (Patreon)

In these post-Marker, post-Farocki times, it's hard to imagine why someone would make a normal documentary, with structure and argumentation, when it's both easier and more theoretically correct to assemble a collection of tangentially related fragments all circulating around the same general theme, It's not a mess. It's a constellation!

I'm sorry of the above sounds embittered or aesthetically conservative. I certainly don't mean to come off that way. It's just that although essay films are in vogue within nonfiction filmmaking, there's perhaps not enough recognition that the essay film is a complex form, probably harder to create effectively that other types of documentary. That's because this relatively open form demands quite a lot of the viewer, and it's vital that the filmmaker give him or her all the necessary elements in order to draw productive, meaningful conclusions. 

I was reasonably impressed with Rat Film, although I did think that it was a bit lacking in organization. Anthony clearly wanted to produce a Markeresque version of "The Wire," with the vermin of Baltimore serving as a metonym for all manner of social and political problems of urban America. Oddly, Rat Film felt both too broad and too specific. It never really found a way to make Baltimore's problems convincingly emblematic, and this may have something to do with Anthony's clear weakness for local color (e.g., the rat bludgeoning guys).

All Light, Everywhere is a film about a subject that's both timely and, indeed, universal. It explores optical technologies, from early modernist experiments in visual data-collection and control (Marey's motion studies, Galton's criminal taxonomy) to the contemporary world of AI, facial recognition, police body cameras, and aerial surveillance. Even if Anthony had not provided a (quite solid) bibliography in the end credits, it would be clear to many viewers who'd been influencing the filmmaker's thinking: Michel Foucault, Jonathan Crary, and indeed, Harun Farocki.

All Light is in the unfortunate position of tilling much of the same ground as an earlier, better film, Farocki's Images of the World and the Inscription of War. Like Farocki's documentary, All Light considers the role of technologies in determining how we see (and don't see), the fact that we build machines to represent the world in specific ways and then use the information provided by those machines to prove -- often in a court of law -- that the world corresponds to what we were already looking for. For Anthony's part, he applies his conceptual collage by using a dominant strand of material as his baseline. We are treated to an extensive (but secretive and highly choreographed) tour of the Axon company, as a chipper PR representative shows us how Tasers are made, or how officers are trained to use their body cameras (or turn them off).

All Light presents all of this corporate propaganda as is, presumably trusting the viewer to question its veracity. But this hands-off approach means that All Light sometimes feels like an annotated industrial / promotional film by a company in the business of making instruments of violence. There's a segment in the film that shows other people addressing this matter while Anthony's crew looks on. In a meeting of leader ans organizers from Baltimore's Black community, a computer-surveillance entrepreneur tries to sell them on his skycam / Google-Maps-on-steroids technology, claiming it will make Black neighborhoods safer. Most of them are having none of it, and express their resistance to having their communities staked out from above.

In the final part of his film, Anthony shows us completely new footage of a high school filmmaking class he co-taught in Baltimore. He admits that he couldn't find a way to incorporate this material into the film, so it serves as a kind of epilogue. We see young Black kids learning to shoot, assemble, and interpret their own footage, becoming critical consumers and producers of audiovisual information. It's admirable that Anthony shows his hand, telling us what his film is really about. But this epilogue also poses the question: what would a different edit of All Light, Everywhere look like if it foregrounded this material instead of the Axon tour? Are we supposed to feel misled, as if the project were about its own process of going astray? If so, it's a strategy that only yields intellectual inadequacy. This is a film that spreads important topics out on the table like tarot cards and asks us to tell our own future.