#52: On Surveillance
Director Theo Anthony's 'All Light, Everywhere' and the limits of the fly on the wall.
Hi friends,
Did you miss me going ham with hot takes (sorry I mean ~cultural criticism~) on films you probably haven’t watched? Well, you’re in luck! Here we go.
Awhile back I watched All Light, Everywhere, a documentary directed by Theo Anthony which premiered at Sundance last year and swept the festival circuit (it’s now viewable on Amazon Prime). It stuck with me to the extent that I thought about pitching an essay about it to publications… But I couldn’t seem to gather my thoughts, or single out a particular argumentative thread, in order to do so. Thinking about it a few months later, I wonder if that’s perhaps inherent to the scattershot nature of the film itself - something which is both its success and its failing.
Matt Zoller Seitz, in a Roger Ebert review, describes All Light, Everywhere as ‘a history of filmmaking, surveillance, and subjective and objective framings of both.’ Anthony cross-cuts between a vast (albeit interconnected) web of theory, tech, and sociopolitical examples and impacts of surveillance, ranging from filmmaking to police body-cameras. I was drawn to the documentary because, as everyone reading this surely knows by now, I’m always interested in the thorny theoretical negotiations around the role of the witness as well as the social contract - the ethics and responsibility - of image making and sharing.
To that end, the film delivers. We see a delineated intersection between image and policing, how various technological advents straddle an increasingly pixelated line between the radical act of witnessing and the carceral act of surveillance. Is there a balance between those things, the film seems to ask, and can there ever be one? We see too a link between image-making and militarism, with regard to the language we use (cue Ansel Adams and also me on a rant about ‘making’ vs ‘taking’ a photograph) and with regard to the technology itself. We learn about the development of early motion-picture cameras alongside the development of automatic weapons; we hear from Steve Tuttle of Axon, a tech company that supplies both body-cams and Tasers to US police. And we see the race, gender, and class divides that shape how surveillance technology is perceived; exuberant body-camera manufacturers shilling their products are all middle-aged white men, whilst the communities that are targeted by these products (and, in many scenes, the police officers being trained to use them too) are people of colour.
Where the film, to me, is lacking is in its pacing and message. There are a great many very good points raised. In fact, too many. Listen, there’s nothing wrong with a broad, sweepingly expository documentary. You know the kind: the sort of one-word-title informative documentaries that are all over Netflix, the type of thing that people who don’t watch documentaries think are the creative extent of the genre. But that’s not what All Light, Everywhere is doing; its wide angle gaze is highly intentional. Anthony is right in assessing the interconnectedness of these issues, the way that the tentacles of surveillance implicate our lived experiences and culture in innumerable ways. The film’s open-endedness, though, feels a bit - dare I say it - privileged in its laziness. Jessica Kiang aptly writes in Variety that the documentary demonstrates a ‘mercurial but penetrating intelligence, though it doesn’t quite close the pincer movement between the past and the present.’ It’s all well and good to present an array of opinions, testimonials, facts, and insights and then let the viewer draw their own conclusions. But to do that effectively, without it feeling like a cop-out or bloated film that loses its steam, the conditions must be right. By that I mean: there needs to be a narrative arc, a sense of trajectory. I appreciate not spelling out a conclusion for the viewer. But you do have to take the viewer somewhere, and then let them land on their own. Otherwise, what’s the point?
The most scintillating moments of the documentary are the all-too-brief flashes of self-reflexivity on the part of the filmmaking team - and the moments of flirtation with the fourth wall by participants and the crew. ‘Cameras don’t take sides. Remember that,’ instructs a police officer training his colleagues on how to use body-cams. It’s a wink and a nudge from the filmmakers; in a split screen, we see both a policeman, whose eyes flick to the camera and then away, and the documentary’s camera operator, on the other side of the lens. The most potent scene is one in Anthony’s hometown of Baltimore, in which a group of Black residents hold a community meeting with a company representative interested in installing cameras in their neighbourhood, ostensibly as a crime deterrent. The attendees voice their discomfort with the all-white filmmaking team recording the meeting. The cameras roll as someone points out that he could have personally suggested people of colour for the film crew, and others criticise the organiser of the meeting for failing to explain exactly how this footage would be used in the film.
Clearly, in a film all about the politic of surveillance, the mode of observational/fly-on-the-wall filmmaking not only has its limitations but is a statement unto itself. This right here, to me, is where the true and most pressing story of the film ought to lie. What a thoughtful, considered film this would have been if the project had been built around those elements, with keen self-awareness at the heart of it all. But All Light Everywhere seems to think that it suffices just to include this self-referential footage as a sort of coda or shield. In this case, it isn’t enough. Carla Hay points out in Culture Mix that ‘in fact, the people who get the most screen time to talk in this documentary are three white men who represent the three factions that are the most involved in how video surveillance is used when policing communities.’ On the micro level, these men provide a troubling perspective that is important for the film to include and implicitly critique. But zoomed out to the macro level, that’s still a heck of a lot of airtime being devoted to these men - often in talking-head type interviews with very few cutaways. By contrast, footage of the aforementioned community meeting is chopped and interspersed. If the making and watching of a documentary is - as the film itself would suggest - an act of surveillance and of witnessing, surely it bears noting who receives the most attention - for better or for worse. And so I would’ve liked to see more self-reflexive investigation into these filmic choices. As Seitz writes, ‘The face of the most eloquent angry person in the room, a Haitian immigrant, is blurred, presumably because Anthony wanted him in the movie but didn't want to get sued—a choice that deserves its own short film.’
Small potatoes:
Opening the Aperture: Women Cinematographers and their Craft: a wonderfully insightful glimpse into creative minds (including that of Iris Ng, the cinematographer behind Stories We Tell, on which I wrote my thesis! Wish this had been published months ago to use in my research, but nonetheless fascinating - and validating - to hear firsthand what the intentions were behind certain creative choices and to consider how they resonated for me as a viewer/scholar.)
‘The Common Tongue of Twenty-First-Century London,’ an excerpt from journalist Rebecca Mead’s new memoir, Home/Land, which I definitely must get my hands on. Mead, a Brit, spent 30 years working and living in New York before recently moving - with her American husband and son - back to London. This piece is ostensibly about filmmaker/artist Steve McQueen’s new installation at the Tate, but veers much more interestingly into a thoughtful consideration of what it means to live abroad - in all its privilege and discovery and wonder and ambiguous loss.
Worth following up the above with this equally astute review of Mead’s book in the LA Times by Charles Arrowsmith, who as another British transplant to the US, Gets It: “Home/Land” certainly has a memento mori quality, but it’s not depressing. In embracing the complexities and paradoxes of home and belonging, Mead also finds solace, even joy. She captures brilliantly the bittersweetness of being far from home, a way of life whose sacrifices are outweighed by a feeling of living deliberately. Perhaps it was only when moving home came to feel as dynamic as moving away once had that she felt inspired to reverse course.”
A manifesto by Malian musical duo Amadou & Mariam, from WePresent.
‘I Am Not Proof of the American Dream’: A sobering and astute op-ed by writer Tara Westover in the NYT about the impossible state of student debt in the US today.
For the nerds out there, a peer-reviewed paper with the fascinating takeaway that head-tilt direction while kissing is culturally dependent. In a study, the majority of Hebrew and Arabic-speaking participants turned their heads left, while English-speaking participants turned right. I don’t know why I find this so interesting?
‘Ted Lasso and the Afropolitan,’ a thoughtful essay by Lilly Havstad in Africa Is A Country about the series’ obvious best character, Sam Obisanya.
The Girlboss and the Anti-Woke Cool Girl: An incisive piece by Jamie Hood for The Drift Magazine which ought to have the Red Scare podcast girls shaking in their boots. A great excerpt: “The tipping of the scales toward these lines of thought has erased feminism’s rich (although, it must be said, politically complicated and frequently conflictual) histories of interconnectedness with black, Latina/x, and Indigenous liberation movements, labor organizing, and Marxist-socialist reimaginings of the political economy. More, the field has been left ripe for the takeover by disingenuously-identified “leftists” more willing to make deals with a horrorshow carousel of the worst (or else most tedious) devils — far-right talking heads, bloviating cancel culture faux-intellectuals, contrarianist provocateurs in the Paglia tradition, and anti-sex work and anti-trans ideologues — than to actually devote time and energy to radical, transformative politics.”
Finally got round to watching part 2 of the new Beatles documentary and once again amazed at it. Resultantly I’ve had ‘Oh Darling’ stuck in my head all week so apologies to everyone who has heard me humming it off-key.
That’s all for today! Catch you next time,
Maddy