by Clara Heras Aguilar
33676766

11/11/2022

Theo Anthony places a lent in his camera and gets his eye close to it. His intention: to show us how his optic nerve is. The subtitles, working here as a voice-over, explain us that it is a blind spot. “The brain invents a world to fill the hole at the center of it”. Thus, the idea of how we need to build our reality up between the edges, is the starter premiss of All light Everywhere, a documentary and video essay written and directed by Theo Anthony in 2021.

This film, which has a strong critical judgment exercise about the affects and effects that image recording practices have in our lives —and in this particular case, surveillance—, intermingles different scenarios in order to form its narrative: The Axon Teaser Company infrastructure, owner of the first body cameras production in 2008; visual sensor experiment recordings; a police officer meeting where they learn both protocols and instructions to set up a body camera; or the way scientists and historians tried to calculate paralleling planetary distances by image operations during eclipses. 

Not just the scenarios mentioned before are fundamental for this composition, but the edition and the kind of images presented in this film: Theo Anthony recovers science planetary schemes that lead us to the origins of the moving image; photographs from the last century that illustrate the linguistic connection between image recording and military artifacts. Moreover, the director put splitting screens or desktop screen to good use and gives his film meaning. 

Through this video essay, we understand Francesco Casetti’s words: “We experience reality in the way technology allow us to”. The act of seeing is, first of all, an act. Therefore, we as spectators, or creators of narratives, make decisions including or not a content. Although Epstein wrote “the camera lens… is an eye without prejudice, without morals, exempt from influences” the truth is that lens, as well as the body camera ones, have a propose, because they were made by us —in this case, an oppressive and violent system—.
Theo understands perfectly this system and leaves proof of the violence that results in. His documentary is not just relevant nowadays due to to the fact that our society must reconsider surveillance itself as a practice, but how related concepts as consent, prejudice, archive or recognition play an important role in how we narrate our history. 

Sources:

·Catherine Grant. The audiovisual essay as performative research ’ Necsus Journal, Autumn 2016: https://necsus-ejms.org/the-audiovisual-essay-as-performative-research/
·Francesco Casetti, ‘Relocation’, The Lumiere Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema to Come, pp. 17-42