In January 2018, American photographer Nan Goldin published a shocking text in the magazine artforum in which she exposed the hold that opioids had had on her life. “I survived the opioid crisis. I narrowly escaped. […] When I came out of treatment, I was engrossed in reports of drug addicts dying from my drug, OxyContin. These are the first words of his story, which resonated for many like an urgent manifesto.
Nan Goldin’s research led her to the footsteps of the Sackler family. This family of entrepreneurs who own the Purdue Pharma company, behind OxyContin, are today widely considered responsible for the opioid crisis in the United States, in part because of their strong marketing campaigns which normalized the use of its addictive and deadly products.
The Sacklers also represent one of the largest philanthropic empires in the United States, particularly in the art world. Until very recently, many world-class museums, such as the Louvre, the Tate Modern or the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in New York, accepted donations from them amounting to millions of dollars, and named pavilions in their name.
Celebrated for her avant-garde queer photographs, and the subject of countless museum exhibitions, Nan Goldin has made a point of using her influence to “empower” the Sacklers. “To get their attention, we will target their philanthropy,” she wrote in 2018.
This is how filmmaker Laura Poitras comes into play (Citizenfour2014) and his film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Recounting the photographer’s fight, the documentary opens with a flash emblematic of Goldin’s militant actions. Along with members of the group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which she started, she entered the MET and threw fake containers of prescription opioids into the fountain in the museum’s Sackler wing, before forming a ” die in » hard-hitting. From the first minutes, she seems as endearing as convincing.
Visceral and political work
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed was born from Nan Goldin’s desire to document the interventions of his group PAIN As if the artist had wanted to extend his photographic approach to the cinema, that is to say, to sublimate the most intimate elements of his life in political gestures. The photographer opens up here — about her sister’s death, about her past as a sex worker and victim of domestic violence — as she never has.
She also found, in Laura Poitras, the best possible person to allow her to tell her story. Thus, the structure of the film, rather classic, does not reinvent the wheel, but nevertheless lends itself perfectly to this exercise. The montage oscillates between scenes of militant gestures by PAIN and sound interviews where Nan Goldin recounts her personal and artistic journey, juxtaposed with her photos. Laura Poitras manages to find the right balance, as she does in all her documentaries, between her own voice and that of her subjects.
Even if the director casts a wide net and tells how a girl who grew up in Massachusetts became an ex-dependent and an activist, as well as one of the most illustrious photographers of her generation, everything is well put together. Partly because all of Nan Goldin’s work is intrinsically, viscerally political. Laura Poitras eloquently demonstrates, for example, the revolutionary nature of her series The Ballad of Sexual Dependencywhere she photographed her friends, including drag queens and sex workers, from the early 1980s.
“The fight between autonomy and dependence is the heart of my work,” she says in the film. The whole thing ends deliciously with a victory for autonomy and emancipation. We see the Sacklers, condemned to listen to their victims, in court. They will then have to pay $6 billion to eight US states. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed thus imposes itself as a necessary and brilliant work of hope, where Laura Poitras excels in the genre of the artist’s portrait.