“Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no….the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses.” — Susan Sontag, On Photography
All Light, Everywhere, the far and away standout film of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, opens with its director, Theo Anthony, filming the back of his own eyeball where the optic nerve is located. Text informs us that the optic nerve connects the eye to the brain but receives no visual information itself and is therefore a “blind spot”, that “at the exact point where the world meets the seeing of the world, we’re blind.” The film follows this line of thought and central metaphor in various ways. This inherent nature of perception gets lost in the sheer volume of visual information we are inundated with—we surrender to images wholesale. One’s own way of seeing necessarily includes this blind spot, our perception is only itself an interpretation, an approximation of reality, that is actively constructed and will always have gaps. All images are incomplete. This opening sequence takes on further connotations by featuring its maker’s own such blind spot, and moreover, by showing us the optic nerve, we see that which cannot see itself. In short, all of our instruments of seeing, whether invented or even our own eyes, have their limitations.
So then, what do cameras show us? Or photographs, for that matter? They too are only approximations. Reality cannot be reproduced, only represented, and only with varying degrees of delimitation and manipulation, whether conscious or unconscious, both by the human wielding such an apparatus and the apparatus itself. Debates over the reproduced image and its relationship to reality go back to the beginning of photography. Theorists often connected photography’s unique relationship to reality as well as its mechanical nature, finding the possibility of objectivity and failing to recognize their fallacy. Later, the moving image inspired similar reactions. Many saw—and still do—that which is filmed as a record of reality.
All Light traces this long saga of humankind’s relationship to reality and its technological capture, fraught with naïveté, from the earliest purposes of photographic evidence, to Janssen’s Passage de Vénus, and other proto-cinema experimentations such as Marey’s motion studies. Many of these endeavours emerged out of scientific ambitions of extracting Truth by way of the camera. Anthony cites a different school of thought, quoting Henri Bergson who argued that “there is no form since form is immobile and reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form. Form is only a snapshot view of transition.” Interestingly, Bergson dismissed cinema in his day but Gilles Deleuze later would formulate his own philosophies of cinema with these Bergsonian ideas of time, space, and movement. Here, Bergson’s thought comes closest to guiding the modus operandi of All Light, that in accepting the limitations of perceiving a universe that is always in motion and beyond seeing anything more than limited snapshots of that movement, we must actively question the assumptions inherent in images and most especially in the technology in which we place our trust.
The film unfolds, introducing various threads, from its historical examples, to staged neuroscience experiments, a crowd gathered to catch a glimpse of an eclipse, and a handful of present day overreaches of technology. One of the main threads centers on Axon, a leading producer of body cameras and tasers. Remarkably, Anthony has the company’s spokesperson, Steve Tuttle, guide us on a tour of their HQ. He takes us through the actual building, remarking on the office layout’s emphasis on “transparency”—a found-money line that couldn’t be more ironic in a film that deliberately seeks to illustrate troubling opacities at every turn, not least of which in corporatist logic. It only takes moments for him to contradict this “principle” as he points out the “black box,” a section of the office that people cannot see into because of the sensitive nature of what they’re working on, which he justifies gives the feeling that they’re “working on something really unique and powerful.” In a later sequence, Steve demonstrates a switch that turns the two-way visibility of one room on and off like a light—call it selective transparency.
Speaking of which, when describing the function of their body cameras, he explains how it is deliberately manufactured to recreate the blind spot of a person. This is because for the body camera footage to admissible as evidence, it needs to recreate what a police officer sees and nothing beyond that, so as not to give a false impression of what information they had at their disposal when, say, they opened fire on someone. So what we have here is an approximation of an approximation, and All Light details the disconcerting shortcomings and distortions of how the body camera is beholden to its own deceptive properties, and how it in fact is inherently designed to protect the police. Even worse: we later discover that the aptly named “evidence.com” where such footage is uploaded is often made available to officers before making a sworn statement. This means that an officer would be able to shape their “recollection” according to the body camera’s own skewed “memory” of an incident. Visual demonstrations of the body camera in action later in the film produce results that would be laughable if they weren’t so disconcerting, as we see recorded images fail entirely at representing anything resembling a human vantage point.
At one point Steve admits, even boasts, that the body camera impacts the way in which someone may respond to an officer because of the knowledge they’re being recorded—in other words, not only do these cameras fail to record reality but they also directly alter it. The authority of the manufactured image dictates human behaviour. The presence of anything always changes something, and certainly this includes the intrusion of a camera which inherently displaces the reality it seeks to record. This process of body camera footage being utilized as evidence is one that currently requires human mediation but is moving closer to pure automation. Entrusting A.I. with the authority of producing and responding to images that they are wired to perceive as reality is an artificial production of reality itself—one that will have real life consequences for human beings. Such a “reality” is out of our hands and in the hands not of some evil corporate boss but in a manifestation of corporatist capital in-itself—a self-perpetuating dystopia.
Over-trust in our perceptive objectivity has in turn led to over-trust in technology which then in turn leads to significant overreach of authority and control. In a capitalist society, this necessarily means that the corporate producers of such technology have a command of the very ways in which we see, construct reality, and govern our laws. It isn’t a simple matter of surveillance, which is rampant and oppressive beyond what we can probably even fathom, but of how images, produced by surveillance or otherwise, determine what we accept to be real. Our society takes its cues from its own production of images. The image now precedes reality. Perhaps this doesn’t sound like a new insight—it’s there in some form in Baudrillard and Debord—but Anthony roots this in our present moment, the technological developments under our nose and the ones that await us in the near future.
The implications here are harrowing but hope beams through Light, not just in its surprise coda I will not spoil here, but in its breaking down of these assumptions through detailed, coherent thought. It effectively presents a way of thinking outside of these imposed parameters that can change how we approach ethics, justice, and community. All Light shakes us, loosens our relationship to images, and encourages a more self-conscious way of navigating what we accept in our reality, politically mobilizing Bergsonian thought as a means to dismantle (and reassemble) our definitions of the virtual and actual. Thus it beckons for us to take an active role in our collective construction of reality.
All Light, Everywhere, as well as Anthony’s previous films Rat Film and Subject to Review (which begins this inquiry into A.I. via an analysis of the Hawk-Eye technology used to govern instant replays in tennis), remarkably renders complex lines of thought into something highly intelligible, making the invisible machinations of the world around us visible. Anthony’s films enlighten and stimulate new thought, functioning as theory, philosophy, and art without alienating the viewer, instead inviting them to participate in the construction of understanding the present and inventing the future. All Light, Everywhere takes the limits of sight as its subject yet it enacts and encourages new ways of seeing.
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