[ Laura Poitras "All the beauty and the Bloodshed" is a powerful
documentary about Nan Goldin’s life and work against the Sackler
family and their role in the opioid epidemic. The film has been
nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED’ REVIEW: NAN GOLDIN’S
REMARKABLE LIFE GETS A TOWERING FILM BEFITTING IT  
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Sophie Monks Kaufman
September 3, 2022
IndieWire
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_ Laura Poitras' "All the beauty and the Bloodshed" is a powerful
documentary about Nan Goldin’s life and work against the Sackler
family and their role in the opioid epidemic. The film has been
nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary. _

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Neon

 

_EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE
2022 VENICE [[link removed]] FILM FESTIVAL.
NEON RELEASED THE FILM TO THEATERS IN NOVEMBER. THE FILM HAS BEEN
NOMINATED FOR AN OSCAR -- BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE.   THE FILM WILL
LIKELY BE STREAMED ON STREAMING SERVICES AFTER THE ACADEMY AWARDS IN
MARCH._

That _title_. Even before it screened, “All the Beauty and the
Bloodshed
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cast a shiver across the Venice Film Festival competition, sounding
more like a line from a Yeats poem than the latest documentary from
the director of “CITIZENFOUR.” The big news: the film lives up to
it. Already a robust director, Laura Poitras
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towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still
greater emotional power.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is about the life and art
of Nan Goldin [[link removed]] and how this
led her to found P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now),
an advocacy group targeting the Sackler family for manufacturing and
distributing OxyContin, a deeply addictive drug that has exacerbated
the opioid crisis. It is about the bonds of community, the dangers of
repression, and how art and politics are the same thing.

The biggest compliment is that this film is worthy of Goldin, a woman
whose words are as stark as her art, and whose art shows our most
intimate and vulnerable selves. To this day, Goldin is known for her
breakout photography collection “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,”
which includes joyfully candid images of the queer family she had at
the Bowery in ’80s New York, self-portraits of sex with her
boyfriend, and then her face with two black eyes after he later did
his utmost to kill her.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” opens with shaky video footage
from P.A.I.N.’s first piece of direct action in The Sackler Wing of
The Metropolitan Museum in 2018. They chant “Sacklers lie, people
die” and then lie on the ground feigning death. Goldin later reveals
that she is inspired by the protest methods of ACT UP during the
’80s. It won’t be the first parallel that she or Poitras make
between the AIDS and the opioid crises, and the politics of how
certain people are left to die in America.

Poitras then takes us back to the suburban house where Nan grew up. Of
her beloved older sister, Barbara, Goldin says, “She made me aware
of the banal and deadening grip of suburbia,” speaking with a
piercing affect that never lets up, not for a single answer, giving
the narrative of her sprawling life the propulsive gait of a panther.
For her part, Poitras understands the connections between events
decades apart to such a degree that every detail included from a
dysfunctional ’50s upbringing will later pay off in tens of
different ways, so that this film achieves the monumental task of
turning episodes from a life into one side of a perfectly intact
shape.

We are told at this early stage that Barbara died by suicide. Nan then
got the hell out of there, warned by doctors that if she stayed at
home, the same fate would be hers. “All the Beauty and the
Bloodshed” is dedicated to Barbara. The storytelling around Nan’s
biography, her queer family, art, and what it looks like to take on
the billionare Sackler family are so thoroughly absorbing that it is
only at the end when everything circles back to Barbara, following the
testimonies of family members who lost children to opioid overdoses,
that one realizes that grief has been the emotional bedrock all along.

Poitras expertly moves from past to present, interviewing the
investigative journalist, Patrick Radden Keefe, whose expose of the
Sackler family in the 2017 New Yorker article “The Family Who Built
an Empire of Pain” resulted in his house being staked out by a shady
figure in an SUV. Poitras is on home turf when it comes to
investigative storytelling and she digs out old adverts from after
1996, when OxyContin was launched in the states by the Sackler
Company’s corporation Purdue Pharma. To combat the population’s
fears they released reassuring commercials, and a man in a suit makes
a direct address to the camera as he tells lies about OxyContin being
non-addictive.

_“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, Courtesy of Neon_

Back once again into the past into the most exuberant part of Nan’s
history: the discovery of her queer tribe, at first in Provincetown
where she became friends with John Waters’ actress Cookie Mueller
and then in The Bowery in New York. A galimorphory of photos and
slides show birds of paradise, drag queens in feathers, young,
beautiful, wild things in the bath, at shows, dancing, smoking,
eating, fucking. The life-force running through these still images is
electric and conjures up a time of freedom and possibility in the
1970s and ’80s, before AIDS, when hordes of people could bundle into
a windowless loft space and live out their artistic and lifestyle
impulses on the cheap.

When AIDS does start taking names, the film stays true, and locates
Goldin’s attempts to express what was happening through her art in
collaboration with the late, great David Wojnarowicz. His text on
“The Killing Machine Called America” is leveled to evoke what was
happening then and what is happening again, in a new way, now

We are given a whistle-stop tour through the subculture, with clips
from films by Vivienne Dick and Bette Gordon and anecdotes from Tin
Pan Alley, a bar where only women worked and Nan was “the
dominatrix.” Each vignette comes with its own colorful detail or
punchline. There is no dry box-ticking information, only vividness. It
turns out that Goldin the orator cuts through the fugue of conformity
with the same wallop as Goldin the photographer, and Poitras is there
to give her the sharp edit that she deserves.

In the context of the breakdown of her relationship with the man who
beat her up, Goldin offers a key: she “likes to fight.” Fighting
is a motif of “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” — whether
against a man who means physical harm, a family where no one tells the
truth, or a pharma corporation intent on laundering its name through
artistic donations.

As the film progresses, the line between art and politics melts away
to nothing. P.A.I.N.’s protests belong in museums on artistry alone,
nonetheless they occur with the very specific goal of getting museums
to stop accepting Sackler money and to take down their names. The film
embeds with the group as they discuss an old memo where the Sacklers
say they want “a blizzard” of Oxy prescriptions to be released
across America. For their next protest, they release a blizzard of
prescriptions from the top floor of The Guggenheim down into its
auditorium. It looks astonishing.

The event that led Goldin to found P.A.I.N. was her own overdose. She
nearly died but came back, and stays clean with the help of a drug
called buprenorphine that she maintains is more difficult for doctors
to prescribe than OxyContin. I won’t spoil the confrontation that
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” suddenly offers up, except to
say that, as it happens, Nan is holding the hand of her friend and
fellow P.A.I.N. member, a tiny gesture that underlines how community
has been the ballast that allowed this extraordinary woman to survive.

The documentary has been so rammed full of information, but in its
last 15 minutes only the core principles flow, revealing a mighty
coherence. The origin of the phrase “All the Beauty and the
Bloodshed” is dropped in to offer a fitting and furious elegy for
those on the other side. This is an overwhelming film. 

 
 

* Film
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* Film Review
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* documentary
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* 'All the beauty and the Bloodshed'
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* Laura Poitras
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* Nan Goldin
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* the Sackler family
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* opiod addiction
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* Big Pharma
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* P.A.I.N
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* pain
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