All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Laura Poitras (CitizenFour) structures her portrait of Nan Goldin like a slideshow in which we're invited to view various chapters of the renowned art photographer's life—some well-known, others kept private until now. The film begins with the outspoken Goldin's activism, aimed at the art museums that have championed her work for decades. Along with the group she started called P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), Goldin uses her status in the art world to call out great cultural institutions for their complicity in elevating and cleansing the name of the Sackler family. The Sacklers, who own Purdue Pharma, the company that manufactures OxyContin, aggressively promoted the use of opioids for pain relief for decades and are thus largely responsible for America's opioid crisis. They are also major supporters of the arts, with many galleries in the world's most prominent art museums named after them. Goldin is both a survivor of OxyContin addiction and a former AIDS activist from the Act Up era in 1980s New York. We see her staging the same type of "die-in" protests Act Up was known for. She and her fellow activists sprawl themselves on the ground like dead bodies surrounding art installations and Sackler galleries with hundreds of pill bottles strewn about them in an attempt to bring awareness about the Sacklers' culpability for so much death and tragedy. Her goal is to get these museums to hold the family accountable, or at least return the Sacklers' blood money.

The documentary also traces Goldin’s troubled childhood in the 1960s, in which she was forever scarred by the suicide of her older sister Barbara, and the beginning of her career in photography on New York's Lower East Side in the 1970s. Much of Goldin’s work documented her friends and members of the various scenes she was part of, which included queer and trans folks, giving them public visibility in some cases for the first time. One of her early relationships with a subject was with actress and writer Cookie Mueller, who starred in many of John Waters' early films. Mueller becomes an intriguing character in this film as do many of the people with whom Goldin worked in the late '80s when she published her book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and curated a show centred on the AIDS crisis that became a political hot-potato.

For two years, Golden worked on this film on her own with the intention of making a documentary about P.A.I.N. and their work. When Poitras got involved she opted to take the film in a more biographical direction. The Oscar-winning documentarian dives deeply into her subject's art career and impressive achievements, as well as the darker side Goldin has kept private, such as her own recreational drug use and her time as a sex worker. We can sense Golden's trepidation at not being in control of her own story as well as her trust in Poitras, whose typically cold aesthetic works in contrast to Goldin's warmth.

The amount of time the film spends on civil disobedience protests—both the contemporary P.A.I.N. work and the archival footage of Act Up—bog it down a bit. A viewer's tolerance for watching so much of this footage will depend greatly on how many other films they've seen about the Act Up era. In my case, I've seen enough that this kind of footage becomes monotonous to the point where it begins to lose some of its power. Indeed, anyone whose seen David France’s excellent 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague, has seen all the footage of this kind they need ever see. What's important to know is that this kind of protest works, as indeed most of the museums the group has targeted have disassociated themselves from the Sacklers. But all that could be conveyed much more rapidly than this picture chooses to. More unique is Poitras’s filming of the online hearings in which members of the Sackler family are legally required to listen to testimony from those whose lives had been shattered by opioid addiction.

Goldin comes across as a powerful force in, and witness to, many key chapters in the recent history of many important movements. Her work speaks for many whose voices have been silenced. Poitras’s film does her justice but never operates on the kind of artistic plane that might have felt more appropriate for this subject.