In just over a half-decade’s time, Theo Anthony has established himself as one of the preeminent voices in nonfiction cinema. Following a pair of short films, the Baltimore-based filmmaker rose to prominence with his debut feature Rat Film (2016), an incendiary look at the relationship between his city’s history of racial segregation and its rampant rodent infestation, and the medium-length 30 for 30 documentary Subject to Review (2019), a dizzyingly inventive investigation into the use of instant replay technology in tennis. Anthony’s new feature, All Light, Everywhere, comes five years after his first, but, like Rat Film and Subject to Review before it, the director’s latest takes as its thesis the deficiencies of both the human eye and the moving image to properly account for the truth of the lived moment.
Inspired by the unlawful murder of Freddie Gray, All Light, Everywhere takes up the use of surveillance technology at the civic and institutional level, endeavoring to map the correlations between these tools and the power structures that assert their value in the name of law and order. Jumping off from the contemporary employment of police-worn body cameras, the film charts the entwined history of violence and the recorded image, from the early development of the photographic rifle to the use of pigeon-flown cameras during WWI, and how these bygone technologies have given way to smart weapons, aerial surveillance, VR devices, and composite portrait practices. In a manner after his acknowledged influences Chris Marker and Harun Farocki, Anthony presents a hyper-analytical view of reality as rendered by modern machinery, zooming in and out of eras and events with a dream-like fluidity that folds the narration and digitally mapped topographies of Rat Film into an expansive audio-visual tapestry that pairs archival imagery, on-the-ground footage of a Baltimore police department body camera training program, and a guided tour of the Axon body camera production facility with hypnotizing female voiceover passages and evocative soundscapes by experimental pop producer Dan Deacon. At once wide-angled and intensely detailed, All Light, Everywhere boldly confronts the problematics of cinematic truth while speaking to the enduring power of the image to create meaning.
In the lead up to All Light, Everywhere’s premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Anthony and I spoke about the authorial bounds of image-making, how archives uphold power structures, creating a body of work, and collaborating with Dan Deacon.
NOTEBOOK: One of the things that fascinates me about All Light, Everywhere is that, other than a brief mention of Freddie Gray, the political dimensions of these various surveillance technologies are left to the viewer to infer. Can you tell me a bit about the genesis of the project? The reference to Gray brought to mind your early shorts and photojournalism work. How far back did you begin thinking you might want to explore this subject?
THEO ANTHONY: The genesis of this project came through closely following all of the police reforms in my hometown of Baltimore after the killing of Freddie Gray and the ensuing unrest. A big part of that push, led by both activists and the Justice Department’s consent decree, was requiring officers to wear body cameras. I didn’t know anything about Axon, the company behind the body cameras, but when I looked into it more I found out that they had recently rebranded from Taser, the stun gun company. I found this connection between weapon and camera compelling. This was in late 2015/early 2016, when terms like “fake news” and “alternative facts” were just hitting the mainstream. I was interested in how these framing devices that translate the “truth” of an event, such as body cameras, could be used to present narratives that don’t necessarily correspond with the “truth,” but with a particular agenda.
NOTEBOOK: Based on one of the last things we learn in the film, it sounds like the movie changed form a bit as it progressed. How did your conception of the project evolve after you initially began exploring this theme of truth and technology?
ANTHONY: From a very early stage, nearly all of the elements that you see in the final film were there. But the ways in which they interact with each other changed pretty drastically. We saw a clear narrative emerging of the ways in which power erases authorship from the tools that it uses to uphold that power, in an attempt to present this picture of the world as “natural” or “objective. You see this with body cameras, where the camera’s angle on the chest means that you don’t actually see the police officer behind it. It became clear to us that it would be hypocritical to speak about these ideas while also erasing myself as the filmmaker behind it. The film isn’t a deep dive into my personal history, but I think it does, in part, trace an honest attempt to reckon with my gaze, to tie that into a larger history. The choice to explicitly address this process marked a definite shift towards the final film.
NOTEBOOK: Did you find it difficult to gauge just how much to include yourself, whether onscreen or implicitly, in the final edit? As a physical presence, I feel like you’re something of a structuring absence in your prior films, in the sense that your authorial voice is presented via various narrative devices—something that does carry over here in the form of the voiceover, albeit this time alongside your presence as an actual interlocutor in both the narrative and in conversations with your various subjects. For me, the opening image of your eye signals an immediate shift in perspective.
ANTHONY: I don’t like being in front of a camera, or hearing myself speak, so that was definitely an impulse I had to fight throughout. We played with a lot of different openings, and it wasn’t until very late that we put in the eye exam, around the same time we were realizing that we needed to make my authorship more explicit. It’s a raw, beautiful, and extremely intimate image—you’re seeing my veins and you’re hearing my breath as if it was in your ear. I wanted to establish the perspective in a physical body right off the bat as a counter-narrative to the god-like “view from nowhere” that many of the tools throughout the film claim.
NOTEBOOK: Can you tell me about gaining access to some of the organizations we see in the film, particularly Axon and the police body camera training sessions, but also the town meeting we see in Baltimore concerning aerial surveillance? I don’t imagine everyone in these situations is thrilled with being filmed. In the latter sequence someone even comments directly on your presence.
ANTHONY: The way that most of these policing technologies, like body cameras and aerial surveillance, are sold to the public is that they will provide greater transparency into policing practices. The thinking goes, if people can see more, they can understand more, and everyone is held accountable. I don’t think that’s actually how it works, but when getting access, I always tried to leverage that transparency angle that they themselves were selling. Also, to be frank, going into these police spaces—I’m a white guy with a buzz cut, and that privilege gives me no small amount of leeway in getting access.
The community meeting was an entirely different situation. We were asked to go there by Ross, the man behind the spy plane. In the entire film, that was the only scene in which I hadn’t communicated extensively with everyone who would be involved—establishing who we were, what we were and weren’t going to film. I arrived in an intimate community space, I was a stranger, and, understandably, people were skeptical of me. In that moment it didn’t matter what my intentions were; showing that skepticism, that push back against my gaze, was really important to grounding my perspective.
NOTEBOOK: The Axon executive who gives you a tour around the facility is quite the character—funny but also informative. Was he always conceived as being one of the major through-lines in the narrative?
ANTHONY: As one of the main voices for Axon, Steve is very good at communicating information about the company. When he speaks, it’s as if the company itself has grown sentient and speaks through him. We always wanted to lean into that performance, while still giving just enough context so that the audience can see the seams and contradictions of the argument for themselves. Axon, as presented through Steve, was always conceived as one of the anchoring threads throughout the film, and the ways in which we tried to critique this system without endorsing it greatly influenced the balance of other ideas throughout.
NOTEBOOK: To go back briefly to the theme of truth and technology: your previous film Subject to Review dealt with a similar subject, only as applied to sports. I’m curious if you see these two films as companion pieces, but I’m also wondering if you can speak about your films as a body of work and if you’ve conceived of them as such? We’ve touched on some of the new wrinkles in All Light, but I don’t think there’s any mistaking the film as one by anyone other than the maker of Rat Film and Subject to Review.
ANTHONY: I was actually working on both films at the same time, so we’ve always joked that Subject to Review is just one really long chapter of All Light, Everywhere. All Light is definitely a deeper dive, more explicit in its political implications, but I absolutely see them as part of the same larger project. That project, running through all my works so far, is an attempt to understand power through the ways in which the world becomes known—through images, through technology, through maps, through bureaucratic policy and procedure. By mapping these frameworks of knowledge and certainty, it’s always my hope to gesture towards an uncertain, unstable, and unformed present that can be seized upon for a more desirable outcome.
NOTEBOOK: Have you seen The History of the Seattle Mariners (2020)? I don’t know if the people behind it have seen Subject to Review, but its hyper-analytical approach feels spiritually akin to your work.
ANTHONY: I haven't, but it's been on my list forever!
NOTEBOOK: It utilizes a grid-like visual interface that immediately reminded me of your work. All Light features its own kind of digital mapping in the form of aerial surveillance. How did you come to learn that this technology was being used in Baltimore? I couldn’t help but think of the GoogleMaps sequences in Rat Film during these scenes.
ANTHONY: Around the same time that the first wave of these post-Freddie Gray police reforms were happening in Baltimore, the news came out that for six months, the Baltimore Police Department had been secretly flying a spy plane over the city, using aerial surveillance to track movements of people and cars during their investigations. Not even the Mayor knew this was happening. When the news broke, the plane’s contract was canceled and it was a huge scandal for the city.
This spy plane company, which is actually called “Persistent Surveillance Systems," is based off of technology that was developed by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pretty soon after the news came out about it being used in Baltimore, I approached Ross McNutt, the founder of the company. He was in a weird position, where he was both on the defensive, trying to rehabilitate his company’s public image, and on the offensive, trying to get his contract back up and running with the Baltimore Police. That put us in an advantageous position to get access. Similar to Steve with Axon, when Ross speaks, it’s his company that speaks through him, and that was likewise a performance that we wanted to lean into. In terms of the connection, I’m always drawn to relationships between map and mapmaker, so there’s definitely resonance with Rat Film there.
NOTEBOOK: You mentioned earlier that nearly every element we see in the film was there from the early stages. Does that include the historical correlations you’re making via the archival materials, such as the brief digressions into combat pigeons and the photographic revolver? While I assume so, I’m also guessing that the sheer breadth of the materials was something you discovered along the way. After all, this is one of the only films I know that features a bibliography…
ANTHONY: While I charted out a lot of the main historical pillars fairly early on, we were always changing what aspect of the story to tell. The contributions of figures like Étienne-Jules Marey and Jules Janssen are extremely well-known, so we wanted to make sure we weren’t just spitting out their Wikipedia entries. We always started with the specific—an image, an event, a tool—and worked out from there.
The archives that we were pulling from are expansive, well-documented, and largely free to access online. It was a true pleasure wandering through all the scanned materials. There’s another side to that though, because the archive is just another way of upholding the power structure that the film is criticizing. These archives exist the way that they do because this is how the victors write their own history. So we were always trying to read these images against the grain.
With the bibliography, we wanted to both pay our respects to the vast amount of work that this film sits on the shoulders of, and to provide anyone who’s interested in this stuff a jumping-off point to go deeper. It’s something that I really wish filmmakers did more often.
NOTEBOOK: Did anything during the research and archival process surprise you or shift your attitude or perspective in a way that altered the narrative you had laid out in your head?
ANTHONY: It’s hard to point to any one thing because everything was always in flux, right up to the end. It’s like we had all these milestones, but the path and direction by which we passed through them was different each time. Not to mention all of the historical figures and threads we researched but didn’t have the time or space to explore within the film.
I was always learning something new, finding new connections in a handwritten note or a collection of photos I had read about but didn’t know any material trace still existed. And then that was always in conversation with how the present day footage was working, which shifted the balance all over again. It’s a process of maniacal iteration. Right near the end I was joking with my sound designer, Udit Duseja, that we could do this project forever, and he told me this quote that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “The work is never finished, only abandoned.” I’m happy to be in the abandonment stage now.
NOTEBOOK: Let’s talk about working with Dan Deacon. One of things I like about his music for your films is that it never draws attention to itself as “Dan Deacon” music, while at the same time it works with the same basic aesthetic palette as his solo albums. How has your working relationship with him evolved over the years? Is he looking at footage and then pairing music with the images, or does he send you things he’s working on as you go?
ANTHONY: I’m really glad you asked this, because it’s one of my favorite things to talk about and gets asked the least. Dan and I’s working relationship goes back to Rat Film, and I think this project is a huge step forward for both of us. Like everything, our collaboration is a process of iteration. We’re constantly riffing, sending each other images and sounds and jokes and crypto shills at all times of day and night. From that chaotic swirl, we’ll establish a rough palette of the tools and methods that will be in conversation with the piece. For this project, we both knew early on that we wanted to work with Susan Alcorn, a legendary pedal steel guitarist based in Baltimore. Susan’s style takes the pedal steel guitar—a unique and somewhat old-timey instrument—and just totally inverts it to produce all these beautiful “between sounds” that felt right for the ideas in this film. Dan brought in our friends Owen Gardner on cello, and Andrew Bernstein on the saxophone, who we’ve both collaborated with in the past.
These three elements formed a sort of core alphabet for us. From there, Dan took the sessions and arranged them into a series of rough compositions, typically on the more ambient side, so that we could work to define the space that the images would be sitting in. At this point, there was no plan for which track would go where—we always give each other a huge amount of leeway in trying out all sorts of combinations.
These sonic spaces formed the bedrock for the editing, and once I had something rough I sent along the assembly. Dan will take that and start to fill out the composition with more nuance that’s specific to the scene. We’ll find certain musical phrases or motifs within the music that we build out into a larger thematic structure. He’ll then send me the score cues, with all of the individual stems. The fact that Dan trusts me, someone who doesn’t consider themselves a musician, to work with his stems is what exemplifies the love and trust that we have for each other as friends and collaborators. Having the ability to work with the individual layers of the track allows me the flexibility to get the timing right, and also to mine all of the different parts of the composition. Sometimes, he’d send me a track and I’d just use a single layer. Nothing is precious with us, and that allows us to really push each other to grow with each project that we do.
NOTEBOOK: With the times being what they are, I must ask: did COVID affect the film at all? I know most of it was shot before 2020, but did the post-production process change as a result of the pandemic? And relatedly, do you have any strong feelings as it relates to online film festivals? By the time people read this the film will have premiered virtually at Sundance.
ANTHONY: I’d say that more than the pandemic, the uprisings of the past summer had a deeper impact, as much as those events can even be separated. Making this film, there was always the worry that we’d be eclipsed by the news cycle. We knew that the ideas within the film spoke to something much bigger, so we deliberately tried to stay rooted in a much longer view of current events.
For reasons which I expressed earlier, the film got to a point where it felt overly conceptual and abstract. It felt like we were punting on the most obvious, real-world effects of the ideas we were discussing. I saw so much well-intentioned but ultimately misguided information going around about body cameras, and we recognized that there was an opportunity for this project, and the knowledge we had amassed while making it, to have a bigger impact.
This marked a definite turning point where we parsed over everything to make sure that the ideas connected to specific policies and concrete practices. It also accompanied some advocacy work that we’ve begun doing on body camera legislation. It’s a recognition that the political work of a film has to continue beyond the film itself.
With regards to online festival stuff, this is my first go-round, so I have to wait and see. I’m excited, I’m anxious, but I’m here for it and hoping for the best.