All Light, Everywhere

Very messy documentary!!! The subject is all over the place, terrible editing, immature camera work and sound. It looks like a graduate school assignment.

Was this a experimental work???

Adages such as 'the Observer Changes the Experiment' sum up this insightful reflection on the limitations of perspective.

As a camera operator and documentary filmmaker myself, I can say that it is easy to confuse what is captured in the lens with the reality. But the map is not the territory, and the image is not the object in question.

Instead, as Theo Anthony's film explains, it is something of a parallax problem -- the position of the observer -- and indeed one's position in authority, as with law enforcement in this film, alters or at least CAN alter what is "seen" in the image.

It's just about accountability and openness, but about understanding the position of observation -- making an apt (but admittedly obscure) metaphor with the Transit of Venus -- a textbook case of parallax perspective-shift.

Parallax (noun) 2. An apparent displacement of an object observed, due to real displacement of the observer, so that the direction of the former with reference to the latter is changed.

Seeing and being seen in an increasingly surveillance- and sousveillance-oriented society cannot account for all the human factors. Bias is built in and hard to strip away.

We have a tendency to take things for granted - i.e. "what you see is what you get" -- but the human eye does not take in the real world, and the brain and its functions remain completely isolated from that real world.

And thus, symbols are substituted in mental calculations, assumptions driving thinking and decision making.. and the questions of morality, justice, fairness and more are mired in the complex questions surrounding the meta-field of Cybernetics dating back to the 50s. My film "The Minds of Men" (2018) covers similar topics from a totally different perspective.

But my interest in the material I have research primed me for the appreciation of Theo Anthony's' fine film. It requires time to digest and think it over, and some audiences don't have energy for that, but a thoughtful viewer will have a lot to walk away with from this rich film.

Boring. Audio hurt my ears at certain points. Overall I'm annoyed that I wasted my time watching this. Read some other of the low star reviews for more details about any this was a stinker.

Covers a small handful of subjects related to photography, criminology, and surveillance, but frustratingly spends most of its time on the least interesting ones. Whenever it picks up on something good that stimulates curiosity, that is too soon dropped and it returns to tedious scenes repeatedly featuring a corporate salesman, and boring police training sessions. It has about three important questions to ask, and asks far more that are really not fully formed. Even the good questions raised are not direct, but more like "how does the future see the past?" or "what do we see when we see a picture?" In other words, woolly-headed academic or philosophical matters which the film should clarify or provide some insight into, but instead just drops in unexamined because they sound important and might add some plausible weight to the emptiness. Seems to be a critique of surveillance technology and an indictment of capitalism's effort to sell its way out of societal failure, but I am reading that into it, as nothing is explicitly stated or advocated for in this film. As others have said, it is slow and boring. The historical snippets are great, but they make up roughly ten percent of the screen time. Not very good film making, not an illuminating documentary, just trying to seem that way and coming up very short. Aesthetically, the annoying, loud, spacey music, long dull shots, and ponderously lazy writing and editing make this a chore. Needed a lot more thought and work before release.

From the very beginning, All Light, Everywhere lets you know that it will demand your undivided attention for its entire run time. It's informative, philosophical, and aesthetically pleasing. The story is about cameras, scientific measurement, human sense, and their limitations to discern reality. The story is primarily told through the lens of the modern surveillance state and its application in law enforcement. All Light, Everywhere is unlike a traditional documentary. Approach it as a Sundance award-winning film.