Ruled by the blindspots: All Light, Everywhere

PERCEPTION: When an image speaks, who does it speak for? Any documentary that opens with its director examining his own retina while holding forth on the centrality of the blindspot – that black matter forever relegated off-camera and beyond the frame of our perception – raises a cascade of questions. The foremost being, «How does one make a film about what we don’t see, what we don’t want to see?» If you’re more abstract artist than a documentarian like Theo Anthony (Rat Film, Subject to Review), you acknowledge that limitation throughout the process, making the viewer constantly aware that the image onscreen is not a «reproduction» of reality, but a «producing of new worlds.» So this would be a good time to state that Anthony’s latest All Light, Everywhere – which just nabbed the Special Jury Award, Nonfiction Experimentation at the virtual Sundance Film Festival – is a nearly two-hour nonlinear collage (barrage?) of images, from archival to contemporary to computer-generated, and sci-fi sound design that interconnects a mind-boggling array of topics. A brief list would include astronomy, the birth of cinema, eugenics, mug shots, militarized pigeons, the «photographic rifle,» body cams from Arizona, and the surveillance state in Baltimore. Because the director, whose touchstones include Harun Farocki and Chris Marker, is attempting to be a sort of roving, all-seeing eye while exposing its constraints, I will try to do something similar – to give a partial approximation of Anthony’s approximation, blindspots included for us all.

To read my meditative take visit Modern Times Review.