Mark Reviews Movies: ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, NEON

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | December 1, 2022

In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, director Laura Poitras examines the life, art, and activism of photographer Nan Goldin in equal measure. We come to learn that these things are pretty much inseparable in Goldin's mind, whether or not she's fully conscious of how much they have come define each other.

She captures moments in time as they happen, because memory is no guarantee of actual recollection. Goldin speaks up against injustice, because she knows the pain and death that silence can bring. She learned these lessons the hard way, and Poitras' film's feels as if we're watching Goldin piece all of it together and recognize how much she has accomplished, as well as endured, over the course of her life.

It's a very intimate portrait, in the same way Goldin's art, which was dismissed by certain "experts" for its personal nature, often is. Her photographs, especially the regularly evolving piece The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, heavily figure into the narrative, as Poitras uses them to highlight Goldin's recitation of her own biography, but they also exist here as a kind of living gallery. The film puts Goldin's work into a context beyond the art galleries and museum exhibition spaces where it would usually be seen. It's right here, inescapably connected to the woman herself and the life she has lived.

At a certain time, such as when she assembled her signature exhibition piece for a book with some accompanying text, Goldin might have worried, if only a little bit, about how she would be perceived, as well as how friends and especially family might respond to seeing themselves in these photographs and within the piece. The time for such worries and doubts is finished for Goldin now. At the time of filming and still, she is in her late 60s, and Goldin has experienced enough and seen enough of what keeping quiet can do not to speak openly and honestly and, when the situation requires, with a necessary level of righteous anger.

As Poitras is following and interviewing Goldin for the documentary starting in 2018, that anger is aimed at the opioid epidemic. She has good reason for that anger.

The specific target of her indignation is the Sackler family, whose members have accrued billions of dollars—if not that next level of normally unthinkable wealth—over the decades by running a couple of pharmaceutical companies. In Goldin's mind (At this point and after at least one major court ruling, it's probably safe to say, without fear of any kind of legal retaliation, in reality, too), that family and the corporate entities from which they profit are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths from drug overdoses, multiple times more cases of prescription and illicit drug addiction, and the pain and grief of countless people who have witnessed loved ones suffer and die.

The contemporary sections of the narrative watch Goldin, who founded the activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) after becoming addicted to prescription pain medicine made and distributed by one of the Sacklers' companies, and her compatriots plan and stage protests against the family. The backdrops for these protests are often museums and galleries of prestige—namely the ones that have accepted donations from the Sacklers and particularly ones that have the Sackler name literally writ large in their buildings.

Poitras films those scenes in an up-close-and-personal way, as P.A.I.N. members use prescription bottles, faux prescriptions, and phony money covered in fake blood at protests inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from atop the spiral design of the Guggenheim, and even in front of the famous pyramid outside the Louvre. Some of these actions climax with a "die-in," as participants lie still on the ground as a stark reminder of the true cost of this crisis.

Such a tactic is familiar to Goldin, whose rising professional career as an artist coincided with the AIDS crisis, when she watched as friends and professional acquaintances died of the disease (Goldin makes a point that it hasn't ended, since she lost someone as recently as 2014 to AIDS). Protests against government inaction at that time used similar techniques, and that's just one of multiple connections between the "now" and the "then" of Goldin's life that Poitras develops with individual subtlety but, as the documentary progresses, growing power.

The other major component of this documentary is a biography of Goldin, although it's not the simple and straightforward stuff to which we have become so accustomed to and forgiving of in biographical documentaries. For one thing, it's Goldin telling her own story, in the moment to Poitras and within the specific context of her current activism.

We learn a bit of her childhood, for example, growing up in a Boston suburb, but Goldin's focus isn't on herself here. It's on her older sister—a bit of a rebel, the cause of much arguing between the sisters' parents, and a teenager whose life was tragically cut short by the psychological strain of the societal stigma placed on mental health issues and the silence that can generate.

This is obviously a defining moment of Goldin's life—a life that so often seemed influenced by destructive stigmas and crushing silence. The whole of the film uncovers and makes such connections, as it depicts her modern-day activism (leading to the fear that people hired by or associated with the Sacklers might be following some P.A.I.N. members, because Poitras seems to have a habit of becoming involved in the stuff of real-life thrillers) and chronicles the photographer's life in her own words. There's a real sense of the subject gaining more and more insight into her motivations for creating art, her ways of thinking about the world, and the depth of her rage against people like the Sacklers and institutions such as their companies.

A lot of biographical documentaries tell us what they think we should know about a person. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed shows us its subject figuring out what she should know about herself, learn from her experiences, and teach us.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products