All Light, Everywhere starts out as a documentary that is simultaneously about police equipment and the faultiness of human perception, ending on an obscenely important point. It is a movie about movies - as in, the very invention of motion photography - and the fallible senses involved in our consumption and creation of images. What does this musing on bias and objectivity have to do with modern law enforcement technology? You'll understand it when you get to the later scenes.
The movie came to us from Theo Anthony, acclaimed for his work on the 2017 documentary Rat Film. His latest project may be his most ambitious (regardless of what he'll be making next), particularly in the scope of what it tackles.
As a documentarian, Anthony proves himself worthy of Werner Herzog, especially in how he leaves in what was filmed outside of that moment of time in-between "Okay, we're rolling" and "Alright, we got it, thank you". Consider the interview in Herzog's masterpiece Grizzly Man, where he lets the camera roll for a bit after the subject abandons her photography-friendly composure and becomes more human, and compare it to some of the scenes of Anthony directing his excited interviewees. There is certainly a thematic reason for it here - one interviewee directly comments on how professional he's being now that he's aware of the camera that's about to shoot him; the lens that knows his every move.
All Light, Everywhere inspires one to question much of what we know, or claim to. The clever editing, eerie use of ancient stock footage (literally as old as "footage" itself), and gloomy score certainly add to the mood. As mentioned, Anthony's choices are thematically relevant, and his technical knack is obvious with every move.
There is also an intriguing history lesson, as the narrator goes over the earliest examples of human beings trying to "capture" linear time (Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky once argued that cinema is the one art form that allows this feat of wonder, hence why he would so rarely cut his scenes). We learn of so-called chronophotography (the immediate precursor to film) and the invention of the Janssen revolver - a device that, effectively, "filmed" a model of Venus and the Sun circa 20 years before The Roundhay Garden Scene and L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat.
The documentary makes the case that this sequence of images might be the first movie ever made, as it predates those other two titles. But if a bona fide movie camera isn't a requirement, we might also argue that it goes all the way back to zoetropes and phenakistiscopes.
A little later down the line, the Janssen revolver inspired the chronographic rifle (yes, a lot of the pioneering movie-camera work apparently involved Victorian weaponry, which may be why we call it "shooting"). Its inventor Étienne-Jules Marey, who was more concerned with motions here on Earth than those of the distant stars, is described to have thought of this instrument as "an entirely new sensory organ, capable of revealing the invisible patterns of the world".
He wrote of their "astonishing precision", unmatched by the ocular tools of man, and sure enough, we do often think of machines - including cameras, which ostensibly observe reality without the taint of human bias and emotion - as boundlessly more objective than our stupid meat brains. However, as other parts of the documentary explain, sometimes there is more to an event than meets the lens. (I wrote in my review of Dr. Strangelove that "the idea of machines that control mankind might never be as frightening as mankind controlling machines".)
Indeed, no matter how sophisticated these technologies become, there will always be some level of distortion. The moments we observe through film must always be processed by a fallible invention before they're transferred through fallible channels to our fallible senses (already affected - made pliable - by pre-existing biases and emotions). All Light, Everywhere is one of the most thought-provoking documentaries I have seen in a long time, and though I plan to see it again, who's ever to say I've seen everything?
