All Light, Everywhere (2021)

directed by Theo Anthony

USA

109 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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"From what history does the future dream?" is the refrain used a few times throughout the course of this documentary, and it is the concept that, I would argue, drives the entire thing. When the film uses that phrase, it's asking us to question what past has created the concepts that we now define as "futuristic": Where did the imaginary of things like surveillance drones, facial recognition software, and police body cameras come from? Where did we get the framework on which this vision of the future that involves photography being deployed as a method of state surveillance is built? This is not strictly a historical documentary - neither is it not one, it is many things - but it does reveal that there is, and always has been, a direct connection between technologies of image-capturing and the use of surveillance by the state to monitor, capture, prevent, and, most of all, invent criminals.

From what history does the future dream? A history where the early use of photography is intimately and inextricably tied to eugenics and colonialism. A history where one of the first applications of the preternatural ability to slow down time, to see frames that our eyes were not, on their own, previously capable of seeing, is to study how people with racialized characteristics are somehow "inferior" to the white, able-bodied, wealthy men creating the photographs. Is it possible to build a future in which photographic technology is divorced from its origins? Can we turn the eye back on the seer? This topic is brought up in a meeting between the (white) operator of a 24/7 aerial surveillance drone, who's looking to sell the people of Baltimore on his creation, and the community, who instantly recognize that they are the targets of his plan, even if he doesn't make this clear and possibly doesn't even want to see it himself. When technologies of recording, of seeing, are deployed, what's necessary, and what often is not done or even considered at all, is for scrutiny to be turned on who is operating the camera. This is another topic the film drills into us: There is no camera without an operator. There is no eye without a body. Even when the eye is an artificial construct manufactured by its millions in a lab, there is no use of a camera without the power of human intent behind it. The isolated footage of a group of Senegalese children walking past the lens of a camera cannot be a recording of the life of those particular children. There is always the question of why these subjects are focused on and why they are in the environment they're in. If we refuse to ask these questions, we may simply see children, without recognizing that the man behind the camera was actively attempting to construct a future in which the children belonged to an easily categorizable, and therefore easily exploited, class of people.

How much of an abomination is the state, that we are actively summoning it into being like some alchemical daemon of old? Every time there is new technology, the apparatus of the state reaches out from the ether to begin inhabiting it. Capitalism continues to give the state more eyes, a new one turning on and looking out at the world every time a brand-new body camera is removed from the packaging and activated and placed on an officer's chest. And now, the state is skyborne, floating above us, capturing images of us as small as pixels on the ground even while we aren't aware. The further technology progresses, the more the state becomes an unthinkable, aiming-to-be-unrecognizable beast. Wresting power back from it involves foiling its attempts to be unrecognizable.

This documentary is not arguing that police body cameras are useless and that state crimes committed in the dark with no witnesses but the murderer and the unable-to-speak victim would be preferable. It is, instead, showing that body cameras are being deployed with the wrong intent. The intent is not to provide an objective record so that the officers involved in violent incidents are punished accordingly and the rate of police-involved deaths goes down. We have to remember that the camera is not an objective viewer. The camera is manufactured, trained, and deployed like an officer of the law itself. Its goal is to show a series of events that accords with what the officer claims about their own conduct, to back up an officer when he says he was in the right. The camera will always be this, because it is in the hands of the state. When bystanders film an assault, when the footage is leaked onto the internet, this is why courts and the state fight tooth and bloody nail to throw it out, to prove that their footage is superior to the cell phone footage that might show the horrible reality of what happened. No eye can be allowed at the scene of the supposed crime that does not belong to the state.

During the total solar eclipse of 2017, which is featured in this film, I was not directly in the path of totality, but I was able to see all the light around me dimmed in a way that was unlike anything I had yet seen. In the lead-up to this event, glasses that would enable safe, direct viewing of the sun were being sold at astronomical prices, and in most places were simply not available to purchase because of the massive demand. This should be familiar after the events of the first quarter of 2020. I went to a location where I would have an unobstructed view of the sun, bringing with me a pinhole camera I'd built out of two sheets of thick paper and some tin foil (it worked, mostly). I planned to use this as my sole way to see the sun during the eclipse, but when I got to where the rest of the crowd was, a man gave me his sunglasses. He said he was leaving and wasn't going to use them anymore, so he gave me something that cost a lot of money to buy at the time, if you could even find it. And so I was able to see the sun. From what history does the future dream? Why are we able to see what we're seeing? Do we see it as a shared expression, like the way sharing a pair of sunglasses might enable two people to view the sun from their own, separate, subjective perspectives? Or do we see it because a single entity is showing us that this is the only possible perspective, that only the image manufactured and captured by them is the correct way to see?