‘All The Beauty And The Bloodshed’: Venice Review

Dir: Laura Poitras. USA. 2022. 117 mins.

The photographer Nan Goldin has always been an uncompromising, disruptive force on the American art scene. Active from the mid-1970s onwards, she turned her lens on her own life and her circle of fellow outsiders and cultural renegades. She photographed herself fucking in fetish gear; bruised and bleeding after a beating from an abusive ex. But as this absorbing, revealing, Venice Golden Lion-winning portrait by Laura Poitras suggests, what makes Goldin a genuinely radical figure is not the transgressive subject matter, nor her activism through art during the AIDS crisis. It’s not even the fact that she blithely admits to sucking off a taxi driver in order to transport a crate of photographs to a gallery at the very start of her career. It’s the fact that, having found herself in the comfortable position of being embraced by the art establishment, she uses the privilege of her profile to go to war against the very institutions that celebrate her.

A fascinating, if sometimes disconcertingly forthright subject

Poitras weaves together a biographical portrait of Goldin with an account of her recent campaign against the reputation laundering through art philanthropy of the Sackler family; the big pharma billionaire dynasty with a fortune earned from OxyContin, the cause of the opioid crisis.

While the details of Goldin’s early life and her growth as an artist perhaps provide the more immediately enthralling aspects of the film, Poitras elegantly justifies the dual focus by teasing out the political through lines from the start of Goldin’s creative output to the present day and the Sackler campaign. The result is one of the more satisfying and provocative artist portraits of recent years. Poitras’ film combines the richly sketched sense of a broader cultural landscape of Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground, with the angular candour seen in Marina Abramovich: The Artist Is Present. The film will also screen in the centrepiece selection of New York Film Festival, and at TIFF, and could emerge as a contender during awards season.

Goldin’s work has long confronted stigmas, shame and secrecy, from her portraits of the intimate moments in the lives of the nocturnal drag queens of 1970s Boston onwards. This makes her an unusually open and courageous subject for a film. Having not previously discussed her stint as a sex worker, she addresses it here. Likewise, she talks about her several brushes with substance abuse, which culminated with an addiction to OxyContin following surgery.

It was this experience which led her to form the pressure group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). And while there has certainly been no shortage of coverage of the opioid crisis, and the Sackler family’s role in it – recent examples include Alex Gibney’s two part HBO documentary The Crime Of Century and the drama series Dopesick – this film’s focus on the complicity of the art and exhibition world until it is called to account brings a fresh perspective on the story.

Poitras’ approach to capturing the spirit of Goldin’s art combines extensive use of her trademark slide shows with vibrant, exhaustively researched archive footage. As a piece of filmmaking, it makes no attempt to match the formal daring of Goldin’s work, but it does deliver a satisfyingly complex and three dimensional framework tying together personal history and creative expression. While Goldin claims that she found her voice through photography, it’s as much her speaking voice which leaves a lasting impression here – low, frostily detached and as hard as a bullet as she describes the impact of her sister’s suicide and her early family trauma, she is a fascinating, if sometimes disconcertingly forthright subject.