Nan Goldin has spent her adult life documenting each moment with her camera. It’s what made her: an unpolished, some may say ugly approach to art — capturing her black eyes, lovers’ boners and the gay boys she hung around with — felt antithetical to what was out there when she first came to the fore of the New York art scene. And yet, for all that creative transparency, there was an alluring mystery that formed around who Nan Goldin was. In the new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, we get a comprehensive look at the photographer’s life and the people who shaped it, from birth through to the present moment.
On the surface, before it was seen by audiences, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed was framed as something it ultimately doesn’t wind up being. Directed by Laura Poitras, a robust, Oscar-winning documentarian, it was set to chronicle Nan Goldin’s battle with the Sackler Family and their ubiquitous presence as sponsors and donors in art galleries across the globe. Her fight had real logic: the Sackler family are responsible for the drug Oxycontin, a strong painkiller many credit with being a leading cause in the global opioid crisis. It’s one Nan has a personal resonance with, having been an addict herself, currently in recovery. As long as the family name graced the halls of the Met, the Guggenheim and the Louvre, Nan and her group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) would protest. ACT-UP style, they send prescription papers cascading from the upper floors of the Guggenheim and litter the Louvre’s fountains with pill bottles.
The film spends half of its two hour runtime in this contemporary setting, but it’s interwoven with history: a moving dissection of Nan Goldin’s past, her fractured relationship with her parents; her rise to notoriety as an artist; early lovers, both beautiful and abusive; and the family she found for herself and then lost, as she integrated herself into the New York City’s pre-AIDS gay scene. David Wojnarowicz, Cookie Mueller and David Armstrong all make appearances.
Laura Poitras is a proudly pragmatic filmmaker. In the past, her documentary subjects have been Edward Snowden (Citizenfour) and Julian Assange (Risk), men operating in fields that require direct answers: data and whistleblowers. She is part-psychologist, trying to eek the interesting and less obvious out of contentious men who may struggle to recognise it themselves. But Nan Goldin’s personality is present in the work she does. She’s controversial, yes, but hardly a nuisance to truly important people. That’s where the Sackler narrative comes in.
It’s the infallible narrative thread in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a story so harrowing — addiction, lost lives, lost children — that it commands us to feel rightful disdain for the Sackler family. In retaliation to P.A.I.N.’s protests, we see the Sackler’s lawyers send lengthy legal documents asking them to turn over all communication related to them. Nan and P.A.I.N.’s members believe cars parked on the street outside their house are watching their every move. It functions like a traditional Laura Poitras movie; absorbing because it highlights the insanity that stems from prescient, real life issues, but then there’s a cut-to-black and a title card: a new chapter. We return to Nan’s life story again.
What’s refreshing is that Laura Poitras is willing to let herself cross over into Nan’s comparatively lyrical spaces in these sequences. They are heard almost entirely with Nan’s voiceover, as her photographs flash onto the screen. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’s story is told in full; those harrowing photos of Nan’s beat-up face and her push-and-pull relationship with the man who inflicted this abuse upon her. In lieu of a straightforward, to-camera interview about the way Nan’s sister took her own life, she overlays a reproduced video projection work she’s made about the event, put to screen, Nan’s voice guiding it.
There may be decades that separate these tumultuous times with the ones that plague her today, but by interweaving the two, it transforms into a showcase of Nan Goldin’s constant battles and achievements: a devastating tableau of addiction, families both found and inherited, and the way loss shapes our emotional and political drive. That was what mattered to her then and it’s what matters to her now.
The film’s credits roll, and the names of Nan Goldin’s loved ones, both living and dead, scroll across the screen like characters in a tragic tale. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the abstract and the explicit cross over; art and irrefutable fact in a sad yet exhilarating dance.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed will be released by Neon in the US and Altitude in the UK soon. Follow i-D on Instagram and TikTok for more on movies.