‘All Beauty and Bloodshed’ Review: Nan Goldin’s Portrait of Laura Poitras Is a Work of Devastating Power

As a filmmaker, Laura Pouras showed her integrity as an investigative journalist, especially citizen four, which documented the history of the whistleblowers. His sophisticated new film has elements of “you are there” immediacy and privileged access, but All the beauty and the bloodshed takes her work to new aesthetic heights and emotional depths. A collaboration with photographer Nan Goldin, the film chronicles Goldin’s activist mission to hold the Sacklers accountable for the opioid addiction crisis perpetrated by his company, Purdue Pharma. But it’s so much more.

It is a portrait of the artist, through his images and words, and an intimate look at indigenous political action. It’s a documentary about families, two in particular that couldn’t be more different but share a dark tendency to avoid the truth: Goldin’s biological family, trying to keep up appearances, and the Sacklers, bent on maintaining an advantage. profit. In both cases, on very different levels, reputation is everything, and the resulting destructiveness is severe. But then there’s the family of friends, misfits and central deviants that Goldin celebrates in her work of more than 50 years, people who turned their backs on convention and created a subculture.

Poitras, as a recorder and reader, conducted audio interviews with Goldin for nearly two years, appearing briefly and then leaving. There are a few talking heads, but the film is enhanced by Goldin’s photographs and slideshows, his voice describing key moments in his life. The events he describes are sometimes terrifying, sometimes exhilarating with discovery, and always shaped by a quest for self-awareness.

His words are precise: with poetic, understated frankness, they get to the heart of the matter, whether he’s describing his experiences with OxyContin addiction, his deeply dysfunctional upbringing, or his life on the fringes among self-reinvented glamor dreamers. In Boston. Low-income gay clubs in Manhattan in the 1970s, when bohemianism was accessible, and in Provincetown. In addition to Goldin’s gritty, poignant and provocative work, Poitras points to Bette Gordon and Vivienne Dickey’s films to set the scene. Goldin appears in the last the looting of freedom (1980), filmed in a brothel where she was a sex worker.

Goldin, who once hosted an AIDS program that angered politicians and the cultural establishment over a candid essay by his friend David Wojnarowicz, used the ACT-UP protests as a model for PAIN. Intervention Now), a group he formed in 2017. Its goals are: to support people struggling with addiction and stop Purdue’s ultra-aggressive and dishonest propaganda at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. .

He used his influence to shake the foundations of the big money art industry with a 2018 article. art forum This called out Sacklers for their role in the health disaster. In some of the world’s most revered museums, where Sackler’s name has long been etched into the wings of the building, Goldin and his countrymen chanted “Temple of Greed!” They managed to die. They threw recipe bottles into a reflecting pool and created a “blizzard” (language borrowed from an internal Sackler document) of pages of recipes that rained down on the Guggenheim rotunda: acts of political influence, and many of them well-respected. successful. But they are also acts of aesthetic shock, captured by a strong sense of his elegant fury.

The document notes that prior to OxyContin, Purdue was heavily promoting Valium, and Putras has some of the nightmare ads that have ever flourished, targeting women and their anxiety. bothering their husbands and families. Goldin has made a problem with the art world’s powerful philanthropists and their ill-gotten wealth.

As for the source of their fearless villainy, the film traces the shaping vein of life. The heart of the film, and arguably Goldin’s work, is her beloved older sister Barbara, a rebellious rebel who was too full of life for her parents. Instead, they and some of the doctors they consulted silenced their firstborn by labeling them mentally ill. Her story is unbearable: her pain, her horrible death, her mother’s way of rejecting her. Neighbors in the suburbs don’t need to know about your domestic clutter and terrifying depths. The art world need not worry about where the money directed by the museum’s benefactors comes from. Inside A ballad of sex addiction., a 1985 slideshow and a 1986 book generally considered Goldin’s masterpiece, included self-portraits showing him scarred and bruised from a brutal beating by an ex-boyfriend. In his self-examination of people’s hard-to-see struggles, his ethos was to deny shame.

Channeling his outrage into focused action, he was able to pressure several museums to sever their ties with Sackler. Poitras, in her usual role as a room reporter, describes a remarkable virtual confrontation, part of the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy hearing, in which Goldin and other OxyContin patients confront members of the Sackler family; their testimonials flash on laptop screens, but they still accuse with emotion. Gardeners can look away for a second, but they can’t look away.

“You grow up,” says Goldin at one point in the documentary, “and they say, ‘That didn’t happen.'” When, after the shudders and flashes of the Soundwalk Collective soundtrack, Lucinda Williams’ voice rolls over the end credits, her voice full of hard punches and candor, it’s the film’s big hat emphasizing that it really happened and that it doesn’t make sense. get rid of it. The story of Goldin’s activism would make a decent movie. The story of his birth and rise as an artist as well. His sister story takes him to another dimension and how Poitras and Goldin brought him together. Threads to Light is a distillation that will likely touch his heart. It’s art.