There’s a telling quote from The Other Side, artist Nan Goldin’s second full collection of photography, which chronicles a portion of her life living with and amongst drag queens in ‘70s New York City. It’s a quote that can be applied generously to her expansive and largely undefinable oeuvre: “You are who you pretend to be.” Goldin has been many things throughout her life and career. Not all of them are things she’s proud of, but they’re inexorable parts of her identity, nonetheless. Every experience informs the next. Every person she meets, every event she witnesses or is a part of, both euphoric and traumatic, are captured within the lens of her camera. Acts of community, happiness, sex, protest, violence, domestic discordance. The camera bears witness to everything, and vitally, censors nothing.
It’s logical, then, that the filmmaker she’s chosen to collaborate with on All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a starkly personal document of her career and recent ongoing fight against the Sackler Family, is Laura Poitras. A journalist and documentary filmmaker who has spent a large portion of her career on literal battlegrounds, Poitras understands the power of bearing witness, the vital necessity of being there in the moment an action takes place to record it. As depicted, Goldin is also on a battleground. Against the Sacklers, a pharmaceutical family largely responsible for the rise of OxyContin, the battle is a legal and ideological one, but the film also emphasizes that it’s the personal and political battles she and her loved ones have been fighting their entire lives that have led up to this moment.
“I survived the opioid crisis. I narrowly escaped,” Goldin narrates from her essay in Artforum, a call to action which details her addiction to OxyContin post-surgery before turning its focus to the people she deems responsible. “I learned that the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries, were responsible for the epidemic. This family formulated, marketed, and distributed OxyContin. I decided to make the private public by calling them to task.” All the Beauty and the Bloodshed does exactly that, chronicling Goldin’s fight, along with that of the collective she’s formed, P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), to get the Sacklers’ name removed from the walls of prominent galleries around the world. It’s a daunting list that includes the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the Met and the National Portrait Gallery. For decades, the Sacklers have cleaned their image by pushing a fortune earned from the aggressive marketing of painkillers through Purdue Pharma into extensive art collections. Goldin leverages her status in the art world to show their true face and hold them accountable for the lives lost to their unchecked greed.
Poitras’ film is told in nonchronological order. In between P.A.I.N.’s acts of protest, including multiple “die-in’s” and other acts committed within museum grounds, are detailed stretches that recount Goldin’s larger life and career. The modern-day sequences are riveting. At one point, Goldin is detained by police during a demonstration, along with one of the documentary’s additional cameras, and it feels as if we are watching a battle taking place in real time. There’s also the standard “talking head” interviews, though these are frequently captured handheld, giving them a sense of immediacy often lacking in traditional documentaries. The biographical portions are narrated by Goldin herself, ruminatively placed over photographs in a continuous slideshow format mimicking the presentation of her own work, such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985).
Her narration is recorded up-close as if in conversation with the audience. Some of what she says is humorous and sardonic; some of the stories are utterly heartbreaking. In many ways, she’s the perfect subject for a documentary, having experienced so much in her life it’s almost unbelievable. Even in the film’s most emotionally intense passages, such as a devastating chronicle of the AIDS crisis (which connects powerfully to Goldin’s current fight), Poitras never cheapens anything for dramatic effect. Much like Goldin’s photographs, the result can be difficult, but it’s truthful in a way that few documentaries are.
Yet perhaps the most admirable aspect of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is how it turns the lens towards Goldin’s subjects, giving personal insight into the lives of the people and communities she knew and immortalized in her work. There are, for instance, the drag queens she lived with in NYC, or David Wojnarowicz, a painter and AIDS activist she worked with closely in the East Village. She beautifully recounts moments from the life of Cookie Mueller, a writer and collaborator of John Waters, as well as her lifelong friendship with David Armstrong, a fellow photographer she first met when they were both teenagers shoplifting steaks from a grocery store. As a historical document of ‘70s-‘80s New York City, these portions are invaluable. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed becomes not only about Goldin’s protest, but about these communities and their capacity to collectively resist and even thrive within a societal narrative that so often paints them solely as victims.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed has many takeaways. It’s intentionally sprawling and uneasy, edited in such a way as to appear vividly incomplete. There are lingering questions, people and actions to be answered for. There’s also a grim shadow in the form of Goldin’s sister, Barbara, whom the film is dedicated to and whose legacy proves foundational to everything that follows. The film’s title comes from a sentence in a mental health evaluation written by a psychiatrist at one of the several mental institutions where Barbara was sent before taking her own life.
The Sackler family isn’t the only malicious force hanging over the story, but rather it’s institutions in general. The institution of normality, of abandoning a child for being difficult or unusual, of abandoning a community for going against the binary. “The wrong things are kept secret,” Goldin states. There are no simple solutions, only the continued act of witnessing and acting on what you see, of fighting for those small victories that matter and, finally, living beautifully on your own terms.
Photo courtesy of NEON
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