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‘All Light, Everywhere’ Review: An ethereal exploration of ‘sight’
'All Light, Everywhere' - Theo Anthony
3.7
The act of seeing, watching and interpreting life from a moving image is a rumination that filmmakers throughout history have pondered, particularly in recent years in a society dominated by social media documentation. From the miniscule lens of increasingly technological iPhone’s to the flagrant beady eyes of a CCTV camera, we are watched more on a daily basis than we realise, with Theo Anthony’s latest documentary exploring this curious phenomenon.
Breaking vision down to a molecular level, All Light, Everywhere is an exploratory film that takes a far-reaching gaze into the biases of how we view the world around us, explaining how something straightforward to one’s natural perspective can be shifted by the influence of technology. Though Anthony picks at the nature of seeing through our phone screens and other digital means, much of his film questions the impartiality of cameras used throughout the police force.
With the recent Black Lives Matter protests still fresh in the consciousness of contemporary society, such a subject offers genuine insight into one of the most divisive forms of social control; surveillance. Collaborating for the most part with the technology company Axon, we spend much of the film discovering the production and use of their body cameras which are worn by police officers across the world, and even their tasers which can be used to apprehend the subject of the first-person footage.
For the most part, it is indeed a revelatory essay, though it remains as dense and as flashy student presentation, confronting a significant daily talking point of contention with an air of unfortunate lofty superiority. Using the voice of narrator Keaver Brenai, at times, All Light, Everywhere feels like a droning art exhibition, installed to lull you to sleep with dystopian nightmares akin to Adam Curtis’ terrifying peeks behind the curtain of reality.
Going back to the dawn of the police mugshot to explain how governmental bias has always controlled the sway of the camera, Anthony’s film undoubtedly swells with detailed importance, respecting the audience’s intelligence with deep dives into the philosophy of ‘looking’. Winning the Sundance award for Special Jury Award for non-fiction experimentation in 2021, such a wordy award is perfect for a film that flows through its subject matter, becoming distracted and focused with the drop of a hat.
At its best, the film is a crucial study into the nature of ‘watching’, questioning the impartiality of the camera when, behind the lens, there is an operator, a manufacturer and ultimately, a viewer, each with their own perspective. Even hinting at how the creation of the Lumière brothers’ iconic movie camera was used to inform a biased point of view, the film takes viewers back to probe the sheer morality of documentary filmmaking in general, nodding to such similar movies as the avant-garde Man with a Movie Camera and Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye.
With flashes of true brilliance that will travel through the jellied flesh of your eye and into the storage banks of your brain, All Light, Everywhere can’t quite rouse itself to be considered a truly revolutionary piece of cinema, even if it tries its darndest.
