Film Review - All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Images courtesy of Madman Films.
Minutes into All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’s moving new documentary about the life and work of Nan Goldin, there’s a moment of vulnerability. Goldin is leading a group of activists into the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, just about the most publicly reputable, canonised institution in the art world – it’s The Met – and she wryly points out her own nerves.
Her and her fellow P.A.I.N. members (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, the advocacy group she founded in 2017 in the wake of the opioid crisis) are there to protest the very name of the gallery in which they stand. The wealthy Sackler family donated extensively to the Met and many other prestigious institutions like it, yet the Sacklers’ heavy involvement in Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, did not sway the Museum from naming an entire wing after them. Goldin and the P.A.I.N. protesters hurl prescription bottles into a large water feature, chanting “Sacklers lie, people die!”, and despite prompt action from security, they gather a large crowd of spectators and smartphone cameras. But when Nan expresses her fears, you can’t help but feel the inequity of the battle she’s fighting. The film that follows shows us that this is just who she is.
Throughout All the Beauty, Poitras structures Goldin’s story into two distinct halves: her biography, a lifetime of art and queerness; and the ‘present’, more or less: her crusade against the Sacklers and the seemingly overwhelming power of their opioid-derived blood money. Poitras, as she did with Edward Snowden in 2014’s acclaimed (and excellent) Citizenfour, focuses herself on her key human subject. Goldin is a bold, iconoclastic figure but also, in Poitras’s camera lens, one who is well-acquainted with the rawness of tragedy and personal suffering.
Her story is far too rich to be justly summarised here, but we learn of tragedy and conflict in her family in childhood, her gravitation towards acts perceived then (some even now) as deviant behaviour, and her subsequent entry into queer spaces and self-professed liberation. One of the most engrossing aspects of the film is watching Nan’s art emerge: in her gravelly, dry voiceover she defines photography as “the only language I spoke… it gave me a voice”. Her seminal slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985) is central to the film, and its unvarnished, often loving depiction of a subculture of sex, heroin, partying and living on the margins speaks to her general sensibility as a photographer.
That unapologetic outsider perspective is what makes the dynamics of Goldin’s activism so fascinating. Her taking aim at the Sackler family carries particular implications. We can witness the Sacklers’ power and influence simply from the array of celebrated, famous museums at which P.A.I.N. stages their protests: they decry the ubiquity of Sackler donations not just at the Met, but also the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. This is a pillar of high art we’re talking about: the Sackler name represents the corridors of power in art galleries, the mechanism through which it is decided which artists and artworks are recognised.
Conversely, Goldin and her contemporaries have always been more or less oppositional, taboo to establishments of any kind: she narrates nostalgically of 80s New York, “the art world was bullshit and Times Square was real life”. But as time and society have marched on, she has become an artist of status – known and respected in the ‘great museums’ of western culture, outside of the queer community alone. That Goldin has weaponised what art-world repute she has, to take on a veritable behemoth in the same domain, is the film’s most powerful idea.
Indeed, All the Beauty is this wonderful study of the marginal, of someone with a heart uncorroded by time in the halls of power, who leverages the success of their life’s work to take on a pure, irredeemable evil. Revelations within the film about the Sacklers’ knowledge of their drugs’ horrific addictive potential are chilling – perhaps the most memorable scene comes when Goldin finally comes ‘face to face’ with a few members of the family. Over a video conference as part of a hearing, they are made to listen to the harrowing personal accounts of Goldin and numerous others who suffered through Oxycontin addiction. The Sacklers’ flat, empty stares, captured on their webcams and then again on Poitras’s camera, make for haunting imagery. The face of Nan Goldin – harrowed, oh-so-human, resolute – carries even more weight.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is screening in cinemas from Thursday the 9th of March. For tickets and more info, click here.