Art, at its finest, holds the world accountable. That notion is fundamental to the work of Nan Goldin. She is a celebrated photographer whose still snapshots of the fringe communities she inhabited, and whose later protests against the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, are two sides of the same activist coin. Having found her voice through photography, and then used it to restore the voices of her subjects, Goldin is a woman who speaks loudly, and defiantly, on behalf of those who would otherwise be denied, hidden, and erased by the status quo.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a non-fiction portrait of the two primary phases of Goldin’s life, directed with editorial deftness and compassion by Academy Award winner Laura Poitras (Citzenfour). Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, and the centerpiece selection of this year’s New York Film Festival (ahead of its fall theatrical release), it’s a documentary that straddles the then and the now, charting Goldin’s contemporary efforts to hold the Sacklers responsible for the opioid epidemic that’s killed more than 500,000 Americans, as well as detailing her long and winding personal and artistic road.
While those two halves don’t, on the face of it, seem to share much in common, Poitras’ film interweaves them into a larger tapestry of standing up for marginalized communities (of which she was a member) by combatting the power structures that seek to silence and dismiss—a lifelong battle for Goldin that’s proven equal parts rewarding, arduous, and tragic.
Goldin’s endeavors with her organization P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) are the framework around which All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is built. Following a wrist injury, Goldin became addicted to Oxycontin. Her struggle to get herself off the legal narcotic—whose pull was so great that she ultimately resorted to acquiring it on the black market and snorting it through a straw—caused her, once clean, to vow to fight back against the Sackler clan she viewed as culpable for this scourge.
Worse, the Sacklers are billionaires whose name adorns dozens of international art museums, including some that feature Goldin’s own work—a fact that motivated Goldin to stage a 2018 protest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur wing that involved throwing pill bottles into the water and chanting “Sacklers lie! People die!”
That moment, as well as subsequent actions taken at the Guggenheim Museum and the Louvre, is captured first-hand by Poitras in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Concurrently, the director flashes back to Goldin’s past. The photographer narrating her numerous ordeals, beginning in “the banality and deadening grip of suburbia” with parents whom she claims were unfit to have children, and with an older sister, Barbara, whose unruliness earned her a trip to numerous psychiatric facilities, culminating in suicide.
Barbara’s unnecessary death was a formative experience for Goldin, as well as a rebellious spark, to the point that as a teenager, she was shipped off by her parents to a foster home. Repeatedly cast aside, Goldin nonetheless found her place among urban gay communities, courtesy of her friend David Armstrong. Moreover, she discovered the camera, which quickly became her vehicle for processing reality and herself.
Poitras juggles both of her narrative strands while simultaneously highlighting excerpts from Goldin’s signature shows, notably “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” an ever-changing series of images of the LGBTQ+ people with whom she coexisted. Those shots of herself and her friends were, at the time, far from the established art-universe norm, but they earned her ever-escalating acclaim and notoriety, all as she navigated a series of bumpy romances, a stint at rehab, and a 1980s-1990s landscape that was suddenly and catastrophically rocked by disease.
From photographing herself with black eyes given to her by her lover, or putting on a controversial gallery show about the AIDS crisis, Goldin’s output was about demanding to be heard and acknowledged in a repressive environment that prized convention (and money) over insubordination and inventiveness—a mission that culminates with Purdue Pharma filing for bankruptcy in 2021 and being forced by a judge to hear the anguished testimonials of some of its myriad victims.
Goldin recounts her travails largely in voiceover, but she’s a visual presence throughout All the Beauty and the Bloodshed as well, seen in countless slides, old movies, and present-day footage of her organizing and orchestrating activist ventures focused on the Sacklers.
In that last vein, Poitras brings in other voices—such as journalist Patrick Radden Keefe and fellow P.A.I.N. member Megan Kapler—to expound on the riskiness of Goldin’s activities, not only for her career but for her literal safety; before long, mysterious men are following and spying on Goldin and company’s residences in what appears to be an attempt at intimidation. As in her youth, Goldin continues to live on the precipice of danger and doom, and yet she remains a figure of staunch feminist conviction willing to prioritize the welfare of those in need ahead of her own.
Whether in the bygone “polyglot” Bowery, where she befriended the likes of Cookie Mueller and David Wojnarowicz, or in the streets of Manhattan protesting with P.A.I.N. to improve the circumstances of drug users, Goldin comes across as an iconoclast driven to destigmatize the alienated and ostracized. Poitras’ film contends that Goldin’s life has been about fashioning and defending a home (or homes) of her own making, a notion summed up by the photographer’s early admission that “survival was an art.”
Marked by confronting and resisting the toxic way things are, and embracing the heartening and heartbreaking messiness of freedom, Goldin’s story is one of many happy and sad endings, all of them intertwined in inextricable knots. Yet it’s also, according to All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a tribute to the power of creativity to change hearts and minds—your own, and others’— and, in doing so, to make the world a more just and liberated place.
