Director: Laura Poitras (USA). Year of Release: 2022
March 10th 2018, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. A middle aged-woman with red frizzy hair is handing out empty pill bottles to a crowd of people. They enter the Sackler Wing together, and head towards an installation that consists largely of an indoor pool. Suddenly they throw the pill bottles into the pool and fall to the ground, staging a die-in as they chant “Sacklers lie, people die” and “Temple of Money. Temple of Greed”.
The billionaire Sackler family sold OxyContin, a highly addictive drug, aware of the dangers which have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Nan Goldin, the frizzy-haired woman, founded P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to organise demonstrations like this, aimed at getting museums and galleries to stop receiving Sackler money. Before P.A.I.N got started, most leading galleries had a building, a wing or an exhibition hall named after the Sacklers-
If you are anything like me, you will vaguely know Goldin for her photographs – vivid and colourful, as if they were taken on Polaroids. Most of them (or at least most of the ones that I knew) are of ordinary people – or, really, quite extraordinary people from Goldin’s Queer and artistic circle of friends. Most famously her collection The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, named after a song from the Threepenny Opera, showed the power imbalance within relationships.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed tells a number of different stories. First there is Goldin’s gradual rise to fame, or at least critical recognition. Archive footage shows her hanging out in the Bowery and Massachusetts with people like John Waters, living in squats and sleeping with anyone – male or female – she could find (we literally see this footage. worried that her photos of other women having sex might be too exploitative, she started taking photos of her own sexual adventures).
The 1970s were a time of excess and experimentation, and Goldin spent time both working as a prostitute and suffering a near-fatal overdose. She started working at Tin Pan Alley, a bar staffed entirely for women, which the owner offered as a way of getting off the game “but only if the woman wanted to”. The bar eschewed bouncers, but if any of the customers turned ugly, the bar staff knew how to deal with them. Goldin was known by drinkers at the bar as “the dominatrix”.
This does not mean that life was one long party. A jealous ex of Goldin punched her repeatedly in the face and tried to blind her. Witnesses report that if they hadn’t pulled him off her, he’d have killed her. In response Goldin’s next photographic collection was of self-portraits in which her eyes are seriously blackened. Victims of domestic abuse sent her thank you letters, some saying that her photos gave them strength to leave an abusive relationship.
When the AIDS crisis hits, the hedonism and promiscuity reduced, and many of Goldin’s friends started to die. But it is not just agony and funerals. We see the actions of militant groups like ACT-UP, on whom P.A.I.N. has clearly based some of its strategy. Indeed on the P.A.I.N actions you see the occasional Silence=Death t-shirt, popularised by ACT-UP in the 1980s. The gallery intervention by a poet wearing a Ronald Reagan shows the theatricality that P.A.I.N would use later.
In between telling us Goldin’s personal and artistic history, the film fast forwards to show us the ongoing campaign against the Sacklers, who do everything in their quite extensive power to intimidate the group of misfits which is challenging their arrogance. P.A.I.N, activists, including Goldin herself, were followed by sinister men in SUV, as was Investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, who wrote a take down of the Sacklers for the New Yorker.
Despite this intimidation, P.A.I.N.’s direct action continued. We witness flash mobs inside and outside large galleries hurling fake prescriptions and money soaked in blood. Gallery visitors chant along. The activists start to enjoy some success, as some galleries refuse to take donations from the Sacklers. This is not enough for P.A.I.N who insist that the various buildings named after the Sacklers find a new name. The Louvre accedes, followed by a number of other galleries.
But you do wonder how pyrrhic P.A.I.N.’s victories are. The Sacklers’ company Purdue Pharma declares itself bankrupt, meaning that the family only has to pay a minimal fine. They sign a deal which exonerates them and any of their descendents from any liability. Sackler bosses are forced to attend a Zoom call where the families of OxyContin victims express their pain, but this looks more emotionally painful to the victims than the Sacklers who are cushioned by their wealth.
In amongst the activism, there is the tragic history of Goldin’s older sister Barbara who committed suicide at the age of 18, following long spells in psychiatric institutions. The film’s title “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is taken from a psychiatric report of Barbara. Goldin strongly suggests that a large contributor to her sister’s death was her family’s insistence that the neighbours didn’t know about their problems (“but they knew”, she says, “they must have heard the screams”).
Goldin also says that her sister “made me aware of the banal and deadening grip of suburbia.” Although she seems to have come from a relatively well-off family, she spent her whole life looking for something as different to her stultifying childhood as she could find. We see some home movies of her mother and father trying – and not really succeeding – to look like normal parents. You understand how both sisters, in their different ways, escaped the family home.
Looking at the number of issues that All the Beauty and the Bloodshed tries to address, you’d expect it to be a bit breathless and unstructured. This is not the case at all. Indeed, by showing these disparate parts of Goldin’s art, life, and activism the film helps us to understand each of these much better than would be possible with a simple linear narrative. For once, a film which switches between different time periods increases our understanding rather than just confusing us.
Definitely worth a visit.
CinePhil 