“All the Beauty and the
Bloodshed”
Movie Review
"All
the Beauty and Bloodshed" is directed by Laura Poitras and explores the
life of Nan Goldin and the downfall of the Sackler family.
All
the Beauty and Bloodshed, director Poitras' ground-breaking documentary about the
photographer and activist Nan Goldin, is at once so vast and complex that it
humbles any attempt to extract it on paper. Told in multiple threads, it
recounts the story of Goldin's youth, the traumatic loss of her sister Barbara
to suicide, her artistic evolution in the 70s and 80s America's queer scene,
and her current activist work with P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction
Intervention Now), the organization she founded in the fight against the
Sackler family. Notorious philanthropists have made billions off the opioid
epidemic, which kills more than 100 Americans every day. And their name still
adorns the walls of museums and universities around the world.
All
the Beauty and the Bloodshed finds the
fight where death and capitalism echo in the laureled halls of our revered
cultural institutions. But this is director Poitras and Goldin's film, and it
embraces personal, national, intimate, and collective histories, connecting
them with the knowledge that one cannot exist without the other. The result is
an impossibly rich and expansive picture of art, love, pain, community, and
struggle that sometimes feels like the screen is cracking under its weight.
Tracing America's path from the AIDS crisis to the opioid epidemic, Goldin's
harrowing process of why she lost her younger sister forces us to ask again and
again: Which bodies matter? Who needs to know? Who is left to die?
Narratively
rich and interwoven, this film moves between the past and present chapters of
Goldin's life, conveying resonances that might be temporarily lost in a linear
approach. P.A.I.N. Investigative montages of Goldin's work interspersed with
photographs of Goldin's strange scenes in 1980s New York recalling the joys and
perplexities of her self-discovery: feather bosses, lipstick, sex, smoking,
violence, intimacy, humanity. The cinematic quality of Goldin's photographs,
evidence like this one, is already stunning. "I wanted them to be proud to
be a part of the work," she says of the radiant drag queens, lovers,
friends, and performers she photographs; The heat soothes her throat. The fury
of her activism against the Sackler family and the drug crisis that took her
life only increases Goldin's admiration for her subjects.
In an age of transcendent existential crisis, it seems
especially necessary to witness the politics and art of grief in All the Beauty
and the Bloodshed, the urgent transformation of grief, and the violent rivers
of history flowing into the present. Its power is devastating. Fierce, vast,
and indescribable, it is true to life. All this: beauty, bloodshed.
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