Laura Poitras, director and producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary Citizenfour about whistleblower in the making #Edward Snowden#, which she followed up with Risk on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, was awarded the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival for her new film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Only once before has a documentary won the festival’s prestigious main prize, when Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA received it in 2013.
Portrait of an artist
Here, Poitras once again portrays a political activist, but All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is notably also a portrait of an artist – both retrospective and with a throughline in the present.
The film is made in collaboration with the esteemed American photographer #Nan Goldin# and tells the story of her life, as well as following Goldin’s commitment today to have the Sackler family’s name removed from various prestigious art institutions due to their ownership of the #OxyContin producing company Purdue Pharma.
Early in the film, we are introduced to Goldin’s complicated and troubled family history and close relationship to her elder sister, who ended up committing #suicide after struggling with #trauma and #mental health# issues. Later we are to learn more about her parents, who may have decided to get children more out of societal conformity than paternal abilities.
Goldin’s story also provides a fascinating insight into artist and LGBTQ+ communities both in USA and Europe through several decades. Many of the people she encountered are portrayed in her photographs, groundbreaking in its time and still strikingly intimate and powerful. However, it also becomes a story of domestic abuse and one where the protagonist falls into serious substance abuse.
For the most part, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed manages to balance a strong throughline in the present with presenting an intriguing and poignant backstory.
Targeting the Sackler family
Later in life, Goldin was prescribed OxyContin – to which she, like so many others, got addicted. Having managed to quit the opioid-based painkillers, Goldin has formed the support and activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), whose primary target is the Sackler family.
Because of their substantial financial contributions, the Sackler name has long been visible on several high profiled museums and galleries. According to P.A.I.N., this is cultural whitewashing of money acquired through the massive opioid crisis in the USA today, for which they hold the Sackler family hugely responsible. The advocacy organization arranges flash mob demonstrations at these art spaces, demanding that institutions such as the Met, Guggenheim, and Louvre stop accepting the Sacklers’ money and remove their name where it is displayed.
The #opioid crisis has been the topic of several documentaries and series lately, among these the drama series Dopesick and Alex Gibney’s two-part documentary The Crime of the Century. Nonetheless, the issue of pharmaceutical companies or their owners associating themselves with the art sphere through patronage and «philanthropy» has not been given that much attention and is an interesting and praiseworthy aspect of Poitras’ film.
Past and present
The film is narrated by Goldin herself through frank and openhearted interviews and often illustrated by her own works of art, in combination with several other narrative elements. For obvious reasons, the scenes showing Goldin’s work today with the P.A.I.N. group have a more observational approach.
For the most part, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed manages to balance a strong throughline in the present with presenting an intriguing and poignant backstory. The two narrative threads feed on and – at least to a certain extent – strengthen each other. Yet it can be argued that both of them may have deserved their own film. Not least since parts of Goldin’s background could have been further elaborated, especially those concerning her parents. A scene late in the film showing the couple’s reaction to a literary quote left behind by their late daughter is perhaps the film’s most moving but also leaves the impression that their side of the story could have been depicted with a bit more depth and complexity.
Although there also are certain elements of #paranoia and #surveillance in the film’s present storyline, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed does not have the same sense of urgency as Citizenfour and Risk. After all, it is a different kind of film – mostly due to its central retrospective part. Which, admittedly, is what first and foremost makes All the Beauty and the Bloodshed both remarkable and captivating.
