‘Seeing is believing,” goes the outdated adage, and but, for a movie that investigates the intimate relationship between surveillance and the police state, Theo Anthony’s absorbing documentary chooses to start with an eerie, unseeing picture. The lens turned on the director’s personal eyeballs, it inspects the optic nerve, which connects the attention to the mind however itself holds no visible info. Just like the neurology of human notion, the recording gadgets utilized by police forces additionally sit on the sting of seeing and never seeing. By advantage of being mechanical, cameras – and the photographs they report – promise an unbiased visible entry to reality, their representations of actuality eliminating the fallibility of human feelings and prejudices.
Enhancing collectively a tour round Axon, a Taser firm now specialising in physique cameras, and coaching lessons for the Baltimore police division, Anthony’s movie exposes how these surveillance devices are designed for the safety of state pursuits quite than odd residents. The purpose is made that this militarisation of the digital camera is nothing new: a line is drawn from fashionable surveillance know-how to innovations within the early years of the shifting picture, together with rifle cameras and legal profile pictures. All Mild, In all places exhibits, too, how cinema, even its documentary type, has at all times been complicit in weaponising photos.
Whereas the trouble put into analysis for this documentary is commendable, finally the aestheticisation of the data dampens its influence. Sonorous and hypnotic, the attractive digital rating finally ends up remodeling surveillance know-how into an otherworldly phenomenon, when in actuality its evil lies in its banality and invisibility. An epilogue exhibiting Anthony’s film-making lessons at a predominantly Black highschool ends the movie oddly; a subtitle tells us we are able to’t see the scholars’ footage as a result of what occurs contained in the classroom can't be “contained” by the movie. In a movie about state-produced photos that dictate the course of justice, it's a unusual resolution to efface outsider voices.
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