All Light, Everywhere (2021 | USA | 105 minutes | Theo Anthony)

A kaleidoscopic experimental video essay about the blind spots inherent in all forms of observation, Theo Anthony’s new film finds a captivating and surprisingly willing primary subject in Axon, a leading provider of both body-worn cameras and tasers to police forces around the country. The company markets these products to the public (and may genuinely believe) as tools of accountability and reduced lethality, which may account for their eagerness to participate in the documentary, showing off their massive retro-futuristic manufacturing headquarters in Arizona (architectural flair includes a giant airlock style entry and a upper floor “black box” panopticon that allows observation through one way glass) as well as an in-depth training for officers of the Baltimore police department.

Someone could easily take this footage and make a straightforward journalistic documentary that interrogates these claims directly, but that’s the furthest thing from Anthony’s approach. Instead, he threads the Axon footage through musings on more than a century of the interplay between photography, weaponry, scientific advances, and policing. It’s a broad and fascinating history that includes the 1874 Transit of Venus and the (failed) race to definitively measure solar parallax, Bertillon’s system of photographing and characterizing criminal suspects, the use of Gatling’s guns to act as high-speed cameras to capture motion, early twentieth-century use of pigeons for aerial photography, Galton’s slide from composite photography and statistics into eugenics, and efforts to get the people of Baltimore to agree to a pilot test in which the city is constantly monitored by high altitude airplanes to create a live version of Google Earth to retroactively surveil crimes.

It’s a mesmerizing compilation that calls into question the very idea of objectivity, highlighting what’s left out of the frame and how surveillance footage is used in courtrooms, in crafting official statements, and (soon) in developing advanced artificial intelligence processing of the vast troves of videos that have been collected. It’s also a film that demonstrates active awareness of its own existence: subtitles are often in conversation with the actor providing narration, footage of focus group analysis of the film appears within the documentary itself, and the effect of the documentarians’ presence in community meetings and training sessions is evident. In the end, there may be no easy answers but the two hour journey is the definition of thought-provoking and perspective-enhancing.

Life in a Day 2020 (2020 | United Kingdom/USA |90 minutes | Kevin Macdonald)

Like the original, which premiered a decade ago at Sundance, director Kevin Macdonald returns to the festival with an astonishingly edited and emotionally overwhelming crowdsourced video collage that confronts the relentless teeming scale of worldwide humanity during one 24 hour period on Earth. This time, though, there are a whole lot more high quality consumer drones, Zooms, and Covid-19.

Life in a Day made for a serendipitous double-feature and an inadvertent study in contrasts with All Light, Everywhere. Here, the surveillance was self-generated: 324,000 videos from 192 countries filmed on July 25 2020 were submitted to the project documenting tiny slices of life. The herculean feat of cataloging them, finding commonalities, and stitching them into a riveting package truly boggles the mind. Macdonald and his team of assistants and producers managed to do just that, loosely shaping the videos around twin narratives: the chronological course of a day (with shared rituals of waking up and facing the world) and the course of life itself (the prologue includes so many births; toward the end, elderly participants reflect on their lives). In between, is the vast “everything else” that makes up the mundane and profound of daily life: teens chatting up their crushes on FaceTime, proposals and break-ups, graduation ceremonies and weddings, funeral rites and burials, spectacular drone footage of nature set against other scenes of environmental degradation, catastrophic flooding, and factory farming.

Current events, like the summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations and anti-masking make brief appearances. More prominent, but not overwhelming are the widespread effects of the coronavirus: abandoned train cars, disinfecting squads, masks, distanced rituals, lonely people who’ve taken to naming household spiders, and a kid whose whole life was ruined by a cancelled trip to an amusement park. A few characters reappear throughout the day, providing a sense of narrative. Some — like a father and son planning a surprise birthday party, a man taking his little dog on a walk through an abandoned city, or a kid waking up with his pet rat and reading it bedtime stories — work to provide a sense of narrative. Others, like a guy driving around rural Illinois in an attempt to see seven Class A trains, are more peculiar with less obvious payoffs. It’s a lot to take in, but the compositions are so balletic that the film courses by in waves of recognition and delight. I hope they come back in ten years to do it all over again.