Sophia Michaels
On the afternoon of March 10th, 2018, Nan Goldin walked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The award-winning photographer is no stranger to these institutions; prints of her groundbreaking work documenting everything from gay subcultures to the stifling legacy of suburbia to her own domestic abuse have graced their walls and entered their permanent collections. Soon, friends and colleagues begin to join her in milling about what was once known as the Sackler Wing, home to the Temple of Dendur and a large pool. A flash mob quickly made itself known, then Goldin and her companions began to throw prescription bottles into the body of water. “Temple of Money!” they all screamed. “Temple of Greed!” Security guards try to remove them from the premises (and block the lens of a movie camera that’s filming it all), yet, as if on cue, the participants in this “action” lie down on the floor and pretend they’re dead — what’s known in certain circles as a “die-in.”
Laura Poitras could have started All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, her documentary on Goldin, in any number of different ways: the Eureka moment of seeing life through a lens darkly for the first time, the infamous Times Square Show in the 1980s where she first unveiled “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” as a slideshow, her first exhibition in a gallery, her first of many ascensions in the art world. All of that is included here, pored over, namechecked, deconstructed, autopsied. When it made its official North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, half of the audience looked like well-heeled patrons of the arts and the other half looked like updated versions of the Bowery hipsters that Goldin hung with during New York’s scuzz-chic heyday.
The fact that she chooses to kick it off with the already canonized Nan biting the hand that’s fed her — or more importantly, calling out those who were complicit in feeding her dependency on opioids — tells you everything you need to know. It’s a portrait of an artist, someone who’s taken family trauma, inspiration from her fellow outliers and the scars of a bohemian life, then used them to fuel a body of work that’s akin to a four-alarm fire. But it’s also a portrait of an activist and a major work of protest art in and of itself, sharing bio-doc screen time with footage of Goldin’s guerilla warfare against Big Pharma and beaucoup calling out of bullshit. One is an extension of the other. It’s all coming from the same sense of engagement and enragement.
The woman behind those snapshots of Seventies queer culture, visual notes from the Eighties undergrounds and a curated exhibit of Nineties post-AIDS anger and communal wreckage that got the N.E.A. up in arms, has indeed earned the right to having her life and work chronicled. Yet a recent downward slide — not her first — ended up giving Goldin a renewed sense of purpose. While recovering from surgery in Berlin in the mid-2010s, she was given OxyContin to combat the pain. Rehabilitation management turned into addiction. She eventually was able to kick her dependency, but at the cost of lost years and lost work. “I believe I owe it to those affected by this epidemic to make the personal political,” she declared in a much-discussed Artforum piece that detailed her affliction and, perhaps more importantly, called out her pushers by name.
That would be the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the company that manufactures OxyContin — and which put out a product that they knew would hit the market as one of the most addictive drugs ever, thus ensuring repeat customers ad infinitum. These were the same Sacklers that have donated millions of dollars to arts organizations and museums over the years, including many that housed and showcased Goldin’s own photography. She formed P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a group that sought to not only support those who’d gone through similar experiences but also demand accountability. “They have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world,” she said in regards to the Pharma clan, and made good on her promise to make the political personal. She would target the Sackler family jewels: their philanthropy.
Goldin is no stranger to activism (her “Witnesses: Against Out Vanishing,” the aforementioned exhibit of work centered around the AIDS epidemic, is revisited at length in Bloodshed and hasn’t lost any of its power), and Poitras is no stranger to filming people purposefully standing in the eye of a storm. The latter’s Oscar-winning Citizenfour (2014) documented political whistleblower Edward Snowden avoiding extradition in Hong Kong while the filmmaker herself aided his exposé. Her follow-up, Risk (2016), took on possible freedom-of-speech martyr/equally possible bad-Bond-villain caricature Julian Assange. There are numerous you-are-there sequences of P.A.I.N. meetings in which disruptive events are planned, with the notion being that every sit-in at a major metropolitan museum doubles as a call to refuse Sackler funding and remove their name from galleries. When their efforts begin to move the discussion about the family forward, the group and Poitras find themselves being followed. Once again, the filmmaker drops you into a nonfiction conspiracy thriller. Once again, we see what powerful people do when their empires are threatened.
In between these extended sequences of screaming truth to power, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ticks through Goldin’s own story, mapping out how a disaffected young woman from the suburbs of Boston became a rebel with a cause (more on that in a second), a first-rate shutterbug-diarist and then a staple on several underground scenes. Poitras divides these bits into chapters, with names like “Coin of the Realm” and “Escape Hatch.” Provincetown, the Tin Pan Alley bar, and the brothel where Goldin briefly did sex work all make appearances, occasionally doing double-duty as stations of the cross. Her time with New York’s No Wave crew had her appearing in Vivienne Dick and Amos Poe’s movies, while you’ll notice a familiar face topped by a vertical-shock of graying hair showing up in her photographs. (That is indeed Jim Jarmusch looking deadpan-handsome in the background.)
She’d already been documenting the Blank Generation and various other boho pomo landscapes and milieus when “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” slouched into existence, and the movie rightfully treats this raw, epic work of reflection as centerpiece and pivot point. Designed as both a movable scrapbook and a slideshow designed to amuse her friends, her magnum opus would end up having a seismic effect once it became a book in 1986. It depicted a world of love and drugs, agony and ecstasy (not in that order), community and oblivion by any means necessary, sex and violence; after Goldin’s then-boyfriend beat her in a jealous rage, she took pictures of herself in the hospital and of her bruised, swollen face. Everything was permitted in this dissertation on, in the artist’s own words, the power men hold in relationships. It was a dispatch from a hidden frontline.
Most of Goldin’s notable work gets the spotlight treatment, of course, as does the low points of her story. But by pinging back and forth between biography and reporting on her staunch fighting against the Sacklers, Poitras eventually collapses the distance between the two. Goldin’s success in the art world is a given as you enter All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, and if you’re up on current events, you know that the campaign to wake the art world up to the ethical ramifications of blood-money donations has its share of victories as well. Yet the intertwining is what makes this more than a time capsule or an icon origin story, and we see how the continuation of Goldin’s work through the click of a shutter extends to the world outside her frames. She was once determined to document her insular worlds. Now she’s dedicated to changing the world at large as well.
About that title: It comes from a quote in regards to Nan’s older sister, Barbara. A young woman who wrestled with her sexuality during the Eisenhower era, chafed against a culture of conformity and would take her own life when Nan was 11 years old, the phrase described how Barbara saw everything the world had to offer yet felt that she couldn’t find her place in any of it. We get the story of how the younger Goldin child admired her sibling and then dealt with the trauma of her loss early in the film. Then Poitras and her subject return to Barbara for the last chapter, and flesh her story out in the larger context of Nan’s then and now.
Suddenly, you see that Goldin has been raging against the machine for two all along, that decades of trying to show things how they really are and to make a place for square pegs may have kept her trying to numb herself, but also trying to obliterate boundaries. The protest isn’t new. The protest is the constant. Premiering in Toronto right on the heels of winning the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed arguably became not just the documentary but thefilm of TIFF 2022; only Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, another work dedicated to mining the past and righting old wrongs, came close to dominating as many conversations. More importantly, it entered the festival circuit as a politically charged take on the standard there-goeth-the-great-artist story and exited it as a peerless act of personal reclamation. I can’t shake the feeling of being shook by it. I can’t wait to see it again.
