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Laura Poitras: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (US 2022), featuring Nan Goldin. |
US 2022. Neon Presents – a Participant and HBO Documentary Films presentation – a film by Laura Poitras – photography & slideshows by Nan Goldin.
P: Nan Goldin, Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras. P: Howard Gertler, John Lyons. EX: Clare Carter, Alex Kwartler, Hayley Theisen. EX: Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann.
D: Laura Poitras. Colour, 16:9 HD. M: Soundwalk Collective. Music Supervisor: Dawn Sutter Madell. Archival P: Shanti Avirgan. Archival Co-P: Olivia Streisand. ED: Amy Foote, Joe Bini, Brian A. Kates.
A non-fiction film featuring the photographer Nan Goldin.
Also featuring: her sister Barbara Goldin (archival). The Goldin family.
Featuring: the Sackler family.
Featuring: David Armstrong (archival), Marina Berio, Noemi Bonazzi, Harry Cullen, Alfonso D'amato (archival), Jesse Helms (archival), Jim Jarmusch (archival), Megan Kapler, Patrick Radden Keefe, Ed Koch (archival), John Mearsheimer, Annatina Miescher, Cookie Mueller (archival), Sharon Niesp (archival), Darryl Pinckney, Alexis Pleus, Mike Quinn, Anwar Sadat (archival), Vittorio Scarpati (archival), Maggie Smith, Robert Suarez, David Velasco, John Waters (archival), David Wojnarowicz (archival).
Loc: Metropolitan Art Museum (New York City). Marian Goodman Gallery (Paris). Harvard Art Museum (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Louvre Museum (Paris). Tate Galleries (London).
Soundtrack selections include [from my screening notes]: – Vincenzo Bellini: "Casta diva" perf. Montserrat Caballé. – The Velvet Underground & Nico: "Sunday Morning" and "All Tomorrow's Parties" – Screamin' Jay Hawkins: "I Put A Spell On You" – Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht: "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" ("Mack the Knife") and "Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit" ("Ballad of Sexual Dependency") from Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) * – Lucinda Williams: "Unsuffer Me".
117 min [IMDb: 122 min]
Festival premiere: 3 Sep 2022 Venice Film Festival.
US festival premiere: 5 Sep 2022 Telluride Film Festival (TBA hors catalogue).
New York premiere: 23 Nov 2022.
Finnish festival premiere: 5 Feb 2023 DocPoint.
Finnish premiere: 10 Feb 2023 – distributed by Cinema Mondo – Finnish / Swedish subtitles by Anitra Paukkula / Sophia Beckman.
Viewed at a press screening at Kino Engel 2, Helsinki, 18 Jan 2023.
Chapters: – I Merciless Logic – II Coin of the Realm – III Ballad of Sexual Dependency – IV Against Our Vanishing – V Escape Hatch – VI Sisters.
“
Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”
– Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (the motto of Barbara Goldin, Nan Goldin's beloved sister) **
Press notes:
Logline
"
An epic story about artist and activist Nan Goldin, told through her groundbreaking photography and rare footage of her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis."
Short Synopsis
"
Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis."
Long Synopsis
"
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis."
"Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, the film interweaves Goldin’s past and present, the deeply personal and urgently political, from P.A.I.N.’s (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) actions at renowned art institutions to Goldin’s photography of her friends and peers through her epic “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” and her legendary 1989, NEA-censored AIDS exhibition, “Witness: Against Our Vanishing.”"
"The story begins with P.A.I.N., a group Goldin founded to shame museums into rejecting Sackler money, destigmatize addiction and promote harm reduction. Inspired by Act Up, they orchestrated protests to call attention to the toxic philanthropy of the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, ignited the opioid epidemic with its blockbuster drug, OxyContin."
"At the core of the film are Goldin’s art works “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”; “The Other Side”; “Sisters, Saints and Sibyls”; and “Memory Lost.” In these works, Goldin captures her friendships with beauty and raw tenderness. These friendships, and the legacy of her sister Barbara, anchor all of Goldin’s art." (Press notes)
AA: Before All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, I had seen from Laura Poitras only
Citizenfour, the disturbing Edward Snowden documentary that was shot in real time as one of the greatest news timebombs of our age was detonated. It was not about sensation. It was about revelation. It was about the end of privacy, the ubiquity of NSA's Big Brother surveillance in the internet age that makes Gestapo and Stasi practices as revealed in The Life of Others look tame. Later we have learned even worse about Pegasus.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is also a big league social documentary, about the North American opioid crisis which has claimed the lives of a half a million of Americans. The target is Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, and its drug OxyContin. The movie covers the international campaign of artists to boycott the influential Sackler philanthrophy in the world's major art museums. The leader of the campaign is Nan Goldin, herself an OxyContin survivor.
The ingenious structure of the documentary proceeds on several levels and dimensions. The main story is about the artists' fearless campaign at the most prestigious addresses of the international art world. Simultaneously the movie grows into a candid portrait documentary about Nan Goldin, starting from her tormented childhood and the suicide of her beloved sister Barbara.
It is also an art documentary about Nan Goldin, the pioneering photographer of milieux and lifestyles "on the wild side". Nan Goldin's major slideshows “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”; “The Other Side”; “Sisters, Saints and Sibyls”; and “Memory Lost” provide the artistic substance. The sound of the slide projector becomes a percussion element. ***
It is also a survey of the East Coast cultural underground and gay and trans communities since the 1970s. Nan Goldin was a member, not a voyeur observer. In this epic about these milieux she registers the evolution across decades from repression to acknowledging androgynous elegance, the AIDS death toll, and steps towards liberation.
Photography became a vehicle of emancipation for the young and inhibited Nan Goldin. It also becomes a weapon in the battle of life against death in successive health catastrophes: the AIDS period, the opiod crisis – and the Covid pandemic during which this movie was made.
* "Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit" ("Ballad of Sexual Dependency") was written for the character of Mrs. Peachum in Die Dreigroschenoper but withdrawn from the libretto before premiere.
** This thought, like most of the narration in Heart in Darkness, is expressed by the sailor Charles Marlow, inside quotation marks. The remark is heard soon after the declaration "Mistah Kurtz – he dead" and "And then they very nearly buried me".
*** English Wikipedia: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (slide show exhibition and artist's book): "
It is an autobiographical document of a portion of New York City's No wave music and art scene, the post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the heroin subculture of the Bowery neighborhood, and Goldin's personal family and love life. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said it "remains a benchmark for all other work in a similar confessional vein." Lucy Davies, writing in The Telegraph in 2014, said it "would come to influence a generation of fledgling photographers, who fell into her truth-telling wake. She was credited by Bill Clinton with inventing heroin chic"."
BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: MORE FROM THE PRESS NOTES: