In Hollywood there’s a huge fixation on whether something is verifiable. Movies “based on a true story” carry more weight, but, ironically, only if they’re fiction. Generally, nonfiction films are not competitive for major awards in the industry outside their own narrow genre category. And even within that category, the films most often rewarded are carefully plotted—if not in preproduction, like with most fiction films, then in post. But even the premise for mainstream documentary film, with its grand humanitarian angles, can be problematized, the framework of some flattened “truth” or formulaic “storytelling” rejected by filmmakers who hope to do something less predetermined. Rat Film director Theo Anthony’s latest film, All Light, Everywhere, out in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on June 4, is not a “true story” but a searching essay.
Like the famously reclusive French filmmaker Chris Marker’s 1983 documentary, Sans Soleil (its title similarly evoking luminescence; in an interview with Film Comment, Anthony called it one of his favorite films of all time), All Light is interested in interconnectedness, perception, and complicity. Namely, Anthony alights upon a revealing link between police body cameras, the government’s various assault weapons used against civilians, and movie cameras. This connection tears through the film, leading Anthony and his cameraman through the body camera and Taser manufacturer Axon’s headquarters; research into how early astronomy laid the groundwork for both filmmaking and automatic weapons; police headquarters; surveillance software designed to watch over riots in Baltimore; a community meeting amongst Black people in Baltimore; and a classroom.
Marker, a white French man exploring ideas and histories in a kind of travelogue, sought to obscure his authorship by not noting in the credits that he was the director of Sans Soleil. Yet his unmistakable signature is unavoidable—and essential to the film. Anthony, also a white man exploring issues that reach well beyond his personal experience, takes a more direct approach: He does not edit his presence—authorial or physical—out of the film. We see him countless times, both behind the camera and stepping in front of it; sequences show him editing the very footage we’ve been watching and pulling up clips from Axon’s library of video. All Light, Everywhere is a tremendous work that anyone merely curious about the various relationships the government has to both private industry and an enormous public ought to see.
Ironically, because of its own imaginative power, it’s not likely that scores of people will line up to watch All Light, Everywhere. The film has no catchy slogan, no grabby description, no exhaustively explanatory trailer. The fate of obscurity so often befalls nonfiction films; that speaks to the way adherence to traditional narrative determines which films are widely distributed, marketed, and awarded in Hollywood. Anthony is keenly aware of this reality, and the likelihood of All Light, Everywhere evading straightforward marketability is itself contained within Anthony’s thread of inquiry. Anthony remains present in often uncomfortable places (a weapons-manufacturing plant, a police training session, a tense community meeting between Baltimore locals and a private surveillance firm) and allows the audience to watch him in those places. The way he chooses to make the film—to focus more on pursuing questions than on devising a sellable story—stands directly against the film’s potential mainstream marketability.
Nonfiction filmmaker Brett Story (The Hottest August, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, Land of Destiny) recently wrote an essay on the very idea of story in nonfiction film, which I read after my second viewing of All Light, Everywhere. In the essay, “How Does It End? Story and the Property Form,” she argues that the premium the industry places on documentary films with a three-act story structure and climax directly relates to our wider political and economic reality. She writes, “The ascendance of story as documentary’s favored narrative form is not, in fact, natural, predestined, nor outside of history. Story has a political economy, and we can best discern its contours and its consequences by comparing it with its (perhaps surprising) likeness in the realm of law and commerce: the property form.”
Story then goes on to explain the event that spurred the essay: A student criticized her film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes because Story, a white woman, is not a member of the communities that prisons primarily wreak havoc on. “While I respected the underlying political impulse of this critique, and suspected that this young woman and I shared some important political commitments,” she writes, “something about the exchange still felt like it missed the mark. And precisely because I wanted to be sure it wasn’t simply defensiveness that was giving me pause, I have been thinking about this conversation ever since. What I realized, finally, was that what bothered me most was the description of my film’s subject matter as a ‘story.’”
A “story,” Story points out, can “belong” to someone. It can be exchanged; it can confer value. From here a connection to property arises—and since the existence of property allows for commodification, Story points out, there’s something to be said about the dominant documentary form being storytelling. In other words, story as a form begets the commodification of—or extraction of value from—the community or subject that a film depicts. The experiences of the imprisoned, abused, neglected, and forgotten people in these documentaries are for sale.
Exploring the question of form in nonfiction filmmaking might feel esoteric to someone simply showing up to the theater to be informed or entertained. But these inquiries are essential to uncovering any level of truth, from any perspective. In All Light, Everywhere, Anthony takes on that work, investigating not only policing and the private weapons industry, but his own vocation as a filmmaker. Why is he there? What is he doing? And where did this tool he’s using, the camera, really come from? With that insistence on curiosity rather than story or plot structure, Anthony avoids falling into the cynical game of anticipating criticism—and instead, in real time, engages critically with his own project and its possibilities. You’ll want to go where his questions lead you.
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