In his second feature-length documentary, ‘Rat Film’ director Theo Anthony explores our blind spots with regard to the role of surveillance in our lives.
In a few years, Theo Anthony proved to be a master of film rehearsal. It does not connect the dots perfectly for us, instead it creates dynamic and stimulating terrain of synapses, with a particular focus on city life and social justice. Historical information and updated perceptions clash, intertwine and illuminate, inviting us to question the structures of power that we might otherwise consider certain. Through a route of apparent deviations, 2016’s Rat movie examined the dehumanizing assumptions of 20th century urban planning. The Baltimore filmmaker’s new offering takes a similar but less diffuse approach, confronting the widespread presence of automated surveillance in our lives and the false and dangerous premises on which it is built.
Intoxicating and full of fascinating details, Every light, everywhere – which received a special jury award for non-fiction experimentation at Sundance – is an engaging and expansive wake-up call. Anthony investigates issues of language, physiology, astronomy, technology and criminology. At the heart of his investigation is the link between photography and militarism. You shoot a movie; you throw a gun. The fact that we use the same terminology to talk about cameras and weapons is no coincidence.
In addition to its rich historical material, Everything light focuses on four contemporary fronts: a neuroscience focus group using tracking devices that are hard to believe; the main manufacturer of body cameras in the country; a classroom where the Baltimore police are being trained to use these cameras; and a company specialized in aerial surveillance.
Adding to the disturbing climate of double language and foreboding, is the electronic score judiciously used by Dan Deacon (Rat movie), buzzing and spinning like the ghost in the machine. Keaver Brenai offers a smooth, shaky voice narration with a current of indignation.
To question the widely accepted notion that cameras provide unbiased evidence, Anthony traces a series of 19th century developments in the use of photography, beginning with the transit of Venus in 1874 through the sun and the technological innovations it inspired. There was intense competition to document the phenomenon, which occurs approximately every two and a half centuries. (In 2017 in South Carolina, we saw a much more relaxed crowd gather for a solar eclipse.)
An invention known as a photographic revolver was inspired in part by the Gatling rapid-fire machine gun, and the chronophotographic rifle was, in essence, the first portable cinema camera. Then, there would be systems for cataloging photographic images, such as Alphonse Bertillon’s method of identifying criminals and the composite portraits of eugenicist Francis Galton, who tried to reduce individuals to types and predict criminal behavior. The documentary does not explicitly discuss facial recognition, but the implications resonate with urgency. And in racing pigeons equipped with cameras that were enlisted as aerial photographers during World War I, we find proto-drones.
In that aerial kingdom, a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, headed by a soft-spoken man named Ross McNutt, is an important figure in Anthony’s film. At the director’s home in Baltimore, the PSS joined the police department in a surveillance program so top secret that even the mayor didn’t know it. At the time of those 2016 flyovers – with a photograph taken every second – Baltimore was a city still reacting to the 2015 Freddie Gray murder while in police custody.
One of the doctor’s most charged and striking sequences finds McNutt, looking for clients after the secret program was exposed and closed, launching his surveillance capabilities aloft to “problem cities” to a community center in a black neighborhood. In this context, the product that PSS “integrates[s] with the local police “and generally characterized as an” impartial witness “becomes a citizen-friendly” impartial witness of police activity. We see a similar repositioning of intentions for Axon International body cameras. They are presented to the public as tools to ensure police accountability, but within the Baltimore police class filmed by Anthony, the emphasis is on police discharge.
Axon, formerly known as Taser International, is an important player in the “less lethal weapons market”, to use an Orwellian phrase. More than half of the police departments in the United States use body cameras, and Axon claims most of the sales of body cameras. A guided tour of its headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, and demonstrations of its products by corporate spokesman Steve Tuttle showcase the concepts of “transparency” and “openness” as well as cutting-edge widgets like “anti-criminal identification confetti”.
But they also reveal clear prejudices, even when the company, like PSS, emphasizes the neutrality of shooting the body camera. It is a source of pride for Axon that its lenses imitate the human eye; Infrared imaging, Tuttle points out, was a “big mistake” that some contestants made, because the court and the jury should not have information beyond the policeman’s perspective using the camera. “There are some things you don’t want to see,” says the director behind his camera, the note of subtle but unmistakable paradox.
Anthony makes his presence known throughout the film: We see him shooting sequences and also filming – and, as a white cameraman at a Black Baltimorians meeting, he does not go unnoticed by the community center participants. It is a common misconception that nonfiction images and footage present “the truth”. When appearing on the screen, as well as by other means, the helmer-writer-editor states that any photographic image or film frame is, by definition, incomplete. This reality is so obvious that it is easily overlooked, especially when we tend to attribute omniscience to machines. Axon, using confidential IP, is teaching its AI programs “to see”, and the images collected on its private servers are its product – yet another spin on the exploitation of personal information by social media companies.
The fact that Anthony received such access to Axon and the Baltimore Police Department may be an indication of how certain these two organizations are that they are working in bias-free ways to stop the crime. “The cameras don’t take sides,” says the police instructor to the class. Through Brenai, Anthony echoes the statement, launching it with skepticism: “Our senses can lie to us. Machines cannot.”
But of course they can, as a little trompe l’oeil f / x demonstrates at the end of the film. What is neutral, what is objective? And, more importantly, who defines it? Every light, everywhere reminds us to pay attention to the limits of our field of vision and to look for blind spots. He asks if automation – the 19th century type and our state-of-the-art digital version – makes us wiser, more efficient or just more deluded.
Location: Sundance Film Festival (US documentary competition)
Narrator: Keaver Brenai
Production companies: Memory, Sandbox Films
Writer-editor-editor: Theo Anthony
Producers: Riel Roch-Decter, Sebastian Pardo, Jonna McKone
Executive producers: Greg Boustead, Jessica Harrop, David Dolby and Natasha Dolby, Tim Nash
Director of photography: Corey Hughes
Composer: Dan Deacon
Sound designer: Udit Duseja
Sales: CAA
109 minutes