All the Beauty and the Bloodshed: An Artist Biography and Documentary For Our Time

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A+

Both complex and rawly immediate, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’s film about the 69-year-old photographic artist and activist Nan Goldin, is a great documentary and maybe the most essential film of the year.

One layer of Poitras’ film is a celebration of Goldin’s life and art, mostly colour photographic portraits and slide shows of herself, drag queens, punks, drug users and members of the LGBT community.

It resonates with a kind of squalid glamour, often shot in dark cluttered interiors, from the late ‘70s on through the AIDS crisis. While Goldin’s work has the fine art stamp of approval from the Tate Modern and the MOMA, her style has become broadly emblematic of a sub-culture, used in such films such as Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986) and Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1998).

Artist-turned-activist Nan Goldin

A second layer of the film concerns her campaign P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now).  P.A.I.N., which started in 2018, targets the Sackler Family, whose drug company, Purdue Pharma, aggressively marketed Oxycontin, and fueled the opioid crisis which has killed hundreds of thousands since the 1990s. 

The manipulations and dissembling  of the Sacklers are well-chronicled elsewhere, in  Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary The Crime of the Century, the Hulu series, Dopesick, and New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. Keefe is interviewed here, admitting to his initial condescension toward Goldin’s campaign, which turned to admiration when he saw the force of her commitment.

The Sacklers, among America’s biggest philanthropists, were major donators to art institutions. Their name was on seven spaces, including the Temple of Dendur wing at the Museum of Modern Art.

It was there, in March of 2018, that Goldin and her colleagues in P.A.I.N. staged a “die-in,” throwing hundreds of bottles of pills into a reflecting pool, and lying down in a circle of bodies, a form of protest modeled on the ACT-UP activists.

Some of the protest imagery in the film itself is unexpectedly beautiful, including a scene where protestors crashed the crowded pay-what-you-can Saturday evening at the Guggenheim, and released handfuls of  prescription scripts from the top tier,  which tumbled like  snowflakes to the floor below.

Goldin became hooked on OxyContin, originally prescribed for a wrist injury in 2017, and went from using the drug legally to buying it on the street, to accidentally overdosing on the synthetic opioid, fentanyl.  

As the film shows, her campaign was directly inspired by her experience of the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, a period when she lost most of her friends.

One of her landmark curations was the show, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (1989-1990), a collection of New York artists responding to the HIV/AIDs crisis. The show had its National Endowment of the Arts funding pulled, largely because of the biting catalogue essay by David Wojnarowicz (himself the subject of a powerful documentary) which chastised the church and politicians for causing needless deaths and suffering by their denial.  

“You grow up being told this didn’t happen,” Goldin says at one point.

A key structural element here is that it’s a film about two families in denial.  The first family in the story is the artist’s own Boston suburban parents. Her mother had mental health struggles, and her tragically mistreated, brilliant older sister, Barbara died by suicide at 18, when Nan was 11.

The second family in denial is the Sacklers. Goldin led a campaign to hold them responsible for the opioid crisis, and they, in turn, evaded, obfuscated and whitewashed their crimes through philanthropy.   

In a striking scene late in the film, members of the Sackler family are compelled by court order, to watch and listen as families tell them about losing their loved ones to the drug. It’s not exactly justice, but something close to it.

Goldin’s art is obsessively autobiographical (she has compared it to allowing someone to look into her diary). And the amount of archival footage and imagery Poitras had to work with here is extraordinary.

But it’s also a film about a voice: Goldin’s. Her intelligent self-awareness, her raspy, clipped direct talk, over two years of interviews, forms the texture of the film. But the real alchemy here is the way Poitras and her editing team of Joe Bini and Amy Foote have transformed her story.

The result is a broad narrative of our time, of the real casualties of the culture wars, and of powerful institutions that spin an aura of political, religious and expert respectability around policies that squeeze the life from society’s most vulnerable.  

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Directed by Laura Poitras. Starring Nan Goldin and Patrick Radden Keefe. Opening in Toronto and Vancouver theatres Friday, December 2.