She is one of the greatest contemporary photographers, and her life is marked by the dead: from AIDS to the opiate crisis, her last battle, Nan Goldin’s journey is unveiled as never before in a documentary event presented in Venice.
Signed Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a journey through the life of the 68-year-old photographer, known for her shots of the New York underground and who saw so much death. With the American director, the photographer opens up a little more, swapping the camera for the microphone.
“Our (recording) sessions together were like therapy without a therapist. I talked about very painful things”explained to Venice Nan Goldin, very early marked by the death of her older sister, deeply depressed.
On this trauma, the film, in the running for the Golden Lion, delivers the reports of psychiatrists describing a child deprived of all support before sinking. It offers a rare testimony of the parents of Nan Goldin, looking like a perfect American couple, filmed by the latter.
According to the psychiatrists of the time, it was not “Miss Goldin”, Nan’s dear sister, but “Mrs. Goldin”, this failing mother, who should have been treated. The photographer says that the suicide of her sister, who threw herself under the wheels of a train, rendered her mute for several months, and that it was through photography that she was able to express herself again .
The voice of the photographer, known for her work on sexuality and drugs, resonates with her most famous photos, including the series The Ballad of Sexual Dependencywhich documents queer communities in 1970s-80s New York.
Nan Goldin lifts the veil on her injuries and her beginnings in precariousness. She says it’s “sucking off a taxi driver in exchange for a ride” that she was able to go to the gallery that bought her first photos. She also says, modestly, having had to prostitute herself in a brothel, which she will get out of by joining a bar run by a lesbian community. She tells how she narrowly escaped death when she was attacked by one of her companions.
The dramas fueled Goldin’s struggles, starting with AIDS, which took away many of his artist friends and also gave rise to new forms of mobilization, mixing artists and activists. A time jump leads to modern times, where Nan Goldin has taken the lead in a fight against the producers of opioid painkillers that have addicted and killed half a million Americans over the past two decades.
The documentary takes a long look at this last David versus Giolath fight. The photographer, having herself come close to death because of her addiction, put her notoriety at the service of the fight against the extremely wealthy Sackler family which produced Oxycodone while being a patron of the most prestigious cultural institutions.
“My greatest pride is that we have brought a family of billionaires to their knees in a world where billionaires have a different justice than people like us”declared Nan Goldin in Venice, specifying that it was necessary to continue the fight for “keep alive” dependent people, “de-stigmatize” and treat them.
The signature of Laura Poitras, confidant investigative journalist of whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, gave hope for revelations about this huge health scandal. This is not the case, but the film nevertheless includes some previously unseen sequences, the strongest of which is the recording of the two-hour legal hearing by videoconference, obtained after a hard fight by the activists, during which the heirs of the Sackler family are condemned to listen, behind their computer screen, to the testimonies of relatives of victims.
Seeing these billionaires stare blankly at their screens, while parents make them listen to the howls of pain of their son in the midst of a crisis of withdrawal, and who has since died, freezes the blood.