All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

This striking documentary is from the stable of heavy-hitter, Laura Poitras, who has made films about the Iraq War, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. In this Venice Golden Lion winner, she covers the life of photographer/artist Nan Goldin, and zooms in on her fight against the opioid crisis in the US. Poitras handles the structuring really well, there are no jarring transfers between 'stories'; at least, I didn't feel any. Taking roughly equal screentime, Goldin's life story runs chronologically, with the shorter timeline of her current activism interspersed. 

It begins (and ends) with Goldin's sister, Barbara, and how she affected the course of her life, and soon turns the focus to the Sackler family, a disgustingly rich cabal of 'big pharma' knobs who have made a proper killing off the sale of addictive opioids since the mid-90s. Goldin, an ex-addict herself, founded P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which rails against the Sackler family's involvement in the arts field. Museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The National Portrait Gallery and the Louvre, have all taken money and/or sponsorship in one form or another from this family. 

There are some amazingly candid scenes from Goldin, she's not at all regretful about anything she's done. After being removed from her family home as a teenager, she drifted around until landing on her calling - photography. She was drawn to the gay and transgender communities of Boston and New York, where she started screening slide shows, eventually culminating in her major work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The recurring touchpoint throughout is Goldin's incredible durability - the amount of shit this woman has been through is staggering. Apart from her opioid addiction, she's had to deal with suicides, domestic violence, discrimination, and the death of many friends during the AIDS crisis. On top of all this, the bureaucracy involved in her attempts to bring the Sacklers to account is a complete arse ache.

The film is brimming with frustration, anger and hopelessness - see the witness statements in the deposition that members of the Sackler family are made to sit through on Zoom - but ultimately I think it's about fighting the good fight and not giving up hope. The title comes from a psychologist's report about some readings from a Rorschach test and the final sequence with Goldin's mother reading a Joseph Conrad quote is both heartbreaking and full of promise. Tough job to strike the right balance but Poitras has pretty much earned her kudos here.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is showing at the Somerville at UWA as part of the Perth Festival from Feb 27 - Mar 5. 

See also:

On the photography angle, Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields (1991) still packs a punch and Goldin has cited Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) as an influence on her work.