All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Citizenfour director Laura Poitras turns her focus on transgressive photographer Nan Goldin, delving into her life, art and the roots of her activism
Academy Award-winning director Laura Poitras has made a career out of documenting individuals who stand up to powerful forces. Her previous subjects include Edward Snowden (Citizenfour) and Julian Assange (Risk), so it’s perhaps no surprise that she was drawn to Nan Goldin, a photographer who has revolutionised the art world in more ways than one.
An achingly personal tale of art, addiction and activism, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed represents a continuation of Poitras’s journalistic approach to documentary and, at the same time, a departure of sorts. Pushing her verité style into a more emotional terrain, the film explores Goldin’s life, from growing up in an abusive family and surviving foster care, to her rise to prominence in the art world. But there’s a political dimension to the film too, with Poitras focusing on Goldin’s crusade to take down the Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma transformed the prescription painkiller market with the invention of the highly addictive OxyContin.
Rather than chart a linear path through Goldin’s life, Poitras begins the film by observing one of her staged ‘die-ins’ at the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organised by Goldin and her advocacy group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), these demonstrations are designed to call attention to the Sacklers' use of philanthropy to artwash their reputation and distance themselves from the opioid epidemic. Poitras has long been interested in how activism and the actions of individuals striving for justice can be channelled in service of change. In Goldin, she might just have found an answer.
Poitras traces Goldin’s transformation from artist to activist by weaving together various stories from her past, with each new chapter illuminating the personal and political roots of her creative practice. Goldin has never been one to shy away from the camera, often including herself among her deeply intimate photographic projects, but here she seems more candid than ever, talking openly about her sister’s tragic suicide, her experience as a sex worker and even the abusive relationship that resulted in the iconic self-portraits of domestic abuse in her seminal work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
Goldin initially founded PAIN after becoming addicted to OxyContin following an operation on her wrist in 2014, but her activism is also a response to witnessing the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s. Throughout the film Poitras uses excerpts from the various slideshows Goldin constructed over the course of her career, including photos from Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing in which she used her camera to immortalise the friends and loved ones she lost to AIDS. It’s here that we begin to realise that the film is ultimately about two epidemics, and a society that suffers from amnesia when it comes to protecting its most vulnerable.
A profoundly moving tale of protest and a window into the brutality of American capitalism, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed not only celebrates Goldin’s work as an artist and activist, but speaks to the importance of community during times of loss.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is released 27 Jan by Altitude