![]() In its concerns and assemblage of elements, All Light, Everywhere betrays the clear influence of Harun Farocki, in particular his 1988 film Images of the World and the Inscription of War. Anthony visualizes this research and elegantly montages it with contemporary nonfiction as well as brief staged sequences, all set to Dan Deacon’s spooky soundtrack of churning cellos, resonant chimes, and woozy steel guitar. The documentary makes extensive use of several scholarly texts already quite familiar in the domains of media studies, surveillance studies, and the sociology of policing, drawing on Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (1990) and Simone Browne’s Dark Matters (2015) in particular. #ALL LIGHT EVERYWHERE FULL#Anthony is a deft editor, and the film is full of teasing stops and starts that pitch us back and forth in time, from the 1874 transit of Venus-as recorded by astronomer Pierre Janssen’s early chronophotographic instrument, modeled on Colt’s revolver-to a present-day Baltimore Police Department training session on the use of body cameras. Like the previous film, All Light, Everywhere weaves together several disparate and sometimes unlikely threads into a seductive and provocative tableau. There’s a blind spot here, but this one is intentional and in plain view: security trumps transparency. Moments later, in the very same Steadicam shot that follows him around Axon’s command center, Tuttle also points out the “black box” where the real research happens-opaque to the workers in the cubicles below and, of course, to Anthony’s camera. Steve Tuttle, a spokesperson for Axon Enterprise-a company that manufactures Tasers and body cameras, among other police paraphernalia-boasts about the importance of transparency, candor, and trust engendered by the open office plan of Axon’s Scottsdale, Arizona, headquarters. This “transparency” is often more about emptiness than clarity. ![]() Where that film slyly, quirkily delved into the historical link between rodent control and the management of urban populations of color in Baltimore, Anthony’s latest project covers subject matter that is likely more familiar to most audiences: the increased techno-militarization of the police, especially the use of optical technologies for evidence gathering, oversight, and “transparency.” Or, as we hear later from the nineteenth-century French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon: “The eye only sees in each thing that for which it looks, and it only looks for that of which it already has an idea.” This makes human vision not unlike computer vision in that it also relies on the identification of patterns and a capacity for inference to learn to recognize, to predict, to fill in that blind spot.Īll Light, Everywhere takes as its subject the long historical relationship between optical technologies and policing, thus extending many of the same concerns of Anthony’s first nonfiction feature, Rat Film (2016). We understand what we see based on past experiences and assumptions. That “we do not perceive this blind spot in our vision,” as the film’s onscreen text continues, and that “the brain invents a world to fill the hole at the center of it,” confirms our suspicions that seeing is also inextricable from delusion. ![]() But the notion that the very act of seeing might entail a kind of blindness rings true, rhyming with our sense that seeing is inevitably bound up with failing to see. We learn at the start of Theo Anthony’s new documentary, All Light, Everywhere, that “the optic nerve receives no visual information.” This is somewhat misleadingly phrased: the optic nerve receives and transmits visual information, yet the precise point at which the optic nerve exits the optic disc lacks photoreceptor cells, thus forming a physiological blind spot, or scotoma. ![]()
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