This premise isn’t questioned on-screen, but it plays up to the plea for skepticism made early on. Axon has an open office setup, which the bland exec says encourages candor. The set up leads to material at Axon headquarters, with a cinematographer helping lead a company rep into the best photographic light this quickly brings home how everything we see is to some degree stage-managed. The results are never offered, but the meat of the movie is the answer: with a lot of complicated baggage. The film is framed by a study that purportedly examines how people react to media. But if a documentary can have set pieces, that’s what Anthony has done here, taking what could have been a cautionary infomercial for the Axon corporation, manufacturer of both body cams and tasers, into a chilling look at the surprisingly violent history of photography. Sure, we may be suspicious of how law enforcement uses cameras, but can we trust anybody to tell the truth with cameras? All Light, Everywhere covers some of this ground repeatedly, its message fairly clear from the outset. Yet Anthony, whose previous feature was the perhaps even bolder Rat Film, doesn’t position himself as a model of objectivity himself. The intent of this arc is obviously to cast doubt on law enforcement testimony, even with the evidence afforded by such cameras. Presenting a history of photography, Anthony draws a line from early devices like the photographic rifle to body-cams worn by police officers. On one level, the narrative here is clear. The lights were only helping foxes find their way.“You gotta understand – your perspective is different from mine.” Those words, spoken by a Baltimore resident reluctant to allow a drone surveillance company to operate in his neighborhood, seem to be the key to director Theo Anthony’s provocative non-fiction essay All Light, Everywhere. Loitering in the middle of the night, he usually found no one else was around, on foot or in a vehicle. Paul Gilmore, North Yorkshire’s electrical engineering manager, did on-the-ground research before the council switched off the lights. “Most residents don’t know whether the lights are on or off,” says Alasdair Ross, a Labour councillor in Ipswich. The truth, however, is that few people outside big cities are out in the middle of the night. Sodium-vapour lamps do that better than carefully focused LEDs. She also finds that pedestrians feel reassured when vertical objects, such as walls and other pedestrians, are well-lit. But Jemima Unwin, who studies attitudes to light at University College London, says that darkness appears to deter people from walking around, at least in the evenings. Local authorities that have reduced public lighting tend to argue that crime does not increase as a result. The borough of Ipswich in Suffolk restored all-night lighting following the murder of Sarah Everard, who was abducted in London in March. Conservative rural districts are often content with darkness urban ones dominated by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, less so. Female students at the University of Lincoln have lobbied for all-night lighting. But when Lincolnshire County Council surveyed residents, it found that the young were most opposed to turning off the lights. In general, young people, women and left-wingers are the most concerned about climate change. Richard Davies, the councillor in charge of Lincolnshire highways, says complaints often fade when people hear that the savings have gone on social care and filling potholes. That is less than in some London boroughs, where the lights blaze on. Despite rising electricity prices, Lincolnshire County Council has managed to cut spending on streetlights by a fifth in the past decade, to £4.6m ($6.2m). Overwhelmingly, though, the aim is to save money.
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