‘All the Beauty and Bloodshed’: Laura Poitras’ Powerful Portrait of Photographer-Activist Nan Goldin
The Venice competition entry from the Citizenfour Oscar winning director centers on photographer Goldin’s advocacy.
Laura Poitras’ new film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which played in competition at Venice Fest, is a powerful documentary that lives up to its title in showing how art and politics are interrelated and, in Nan Goldin’s case, mutually dependent.
A collaboration with photographer Nan Goldin, the film chronicles Goldin’s activist mission to hold the Sacklers responsible for the opioid addiction crisis that their company Purdue Pharma had created and helped to perpetrate.
Goldin’s art and activism are merged in a verite-like style, and it’s a credit to her team of editors (Joe Bini, Amy Foote, and Brian A. Kates) that the cross-cuts between exposition and narration on Goldin’s fascinating biography and present-day passages are so effectively done.
Poitras has acknowledged that “Nan’s art and vision has inspired my work for years, and it has influenced generations of filmmakers.”
All the Blood also will screen in October at the 2022 NYFF, where it will be the festival’s centerpiece film, with the official poster designed by Goldin.
The film’s distributor, Neon, said that the theatrical release would coincide with a retrospective of Goldin’s work at the Moderna Museet, set to open October 29, 2022.
She describes her experience with OxyContin addiction, her dysfunctional upbringing, and her life on the fringes, spent in Boston’s gay clubs and low-rent Manhattan apartments.
Poitras excerpts the indie films of Bette Gordon and Vivienne Dick to evoke the scene. Goldin appears in the latter’s Liberty’s Booty (1980), shot at the brothel where she had done sex work.
She was able to shake the rich art industry with an article in Artforum that called out the Sacklers for their role in the health disaster.
At some of the world’s most revered museums, Goldin and fellow activists recited the “Temple of greed!” staging die-ins, throwing prescription bottles, and dumping prescription pages into the Guggenheim’s rotunda. They were acts of political outrage, which also had strong aesthetic elements.
Before OxyContin, Purdue was pushing Valium hard, targeting women’s domestic and familial anxieties. Goldin points her finger at powerful art-world philanthropists and their ill-gotten riches.
The story of Goldin’s growth as an artist and activist are interweaved with the tragic tale of her sister, who committed suicide.
The trauma from which Goldin is still unable to recover is the fate of her free-spirited sister, who was failed by their parents and the healthcare system before she died. Goldin’s older sister, Barbara, was a “free-spirited,” and “rebellious nonconformist.” Their parents and the doctors they consulted managed to silence Barbara and her excruciating pain with the “simple” label of mental illness. Goldin believes that her parents had “no business having children.”
In her focused action, she’s effective in pressuring some museums to cut their Sackler ties. Poitras captures virtual confrontation, part of Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy hearing, in which Goldin and people affected by OxyContin confront the Sackler family.
“You grow up,” Goldin says in the film, “being told, ‘That didn’t happen,” but it did happen.
End Note:
The film premiered on September 3, 2022, at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it was awarded by the jury (headed by Julianne Moore) the Golden Lion making it the second documentary (following Sacro GRA in 2013) to win the top prize at Venice.
About Laura Poitras
Poitras, who is 58, has received numerous awards for her work, including the 2015 Best Documentary Feature Oscar for Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden.
My Country, My Country received a nomination in the same category in 2007.
She also won the 2013 George Polk Award for national security reporting related to the NSA disclosures. The NSA reporting by Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman contributed to the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service awarded jointly to The Guardian and The Washington Post.
