Nan Goldin revolutionized the art of photography and reinvented the notion of gender and definitions of normality. An immense artist, Nan Goldin is also a tireless activist who, for years, has fought against the Sackler family, responsible for the opiate crisis in the United States and around the world. All the beauty and the bloodsheddocumentary by Laura Poitras nominated for the 2023 Oscars, takes us to the heart of his artistic and political struggles, driven by friendship, humanism and emotion.
Internationally renowned photographer and visual artist, Nan Goldin has been documenting the intimate life of his circle of friends and artists since the early 1970s and celebrating underground cultures too often stigmatized by mainstream society, through landmark works such as the slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985) or the multidisciplinary exhibition Witnesses : Against Our Vanishing (1989). It is regularly the subject of retrospectives in the greatest museums in the world (including Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan, etc. in the coming months).
At the end of 2017, Nan Goldin embarked on a new fight: activism against the Sackler family, responsible for the opiate crisis in the United States and around the world. After surviving the ordeal of opiate addiction herself, she decides to use her notoriety in the art world to stand up to those powerful people who profit from human suffering. The resolution to act comes when she learns that the distributors of naloxone, a reference drug in the emergency treatment of opioid overdoses, which were to be installed in free access in the city of Cambridge (Massachusetts), would not finally see never day. “Billionaires had blocked the project”she explains. “That’s what pushed me to get involved in this fight”.
Along with a few other artists and activists, Nan Goldin founded the PAIN collective (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which advocates the reduction of health risks and the prevention of overdoses. PAIN takes aim at the Sackler family, which has made huge profits from the opiate crisis that has already caused the death of half a million Americans. Famous for their generous donations to museums and other prestigious art institutions, the Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company that markets the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin and develops outrageous marketing to boost sales despite the devastating consequences of the coronavirus. resulting epidemic. For years, the legal steps taken against Purdue Pharma have had little effect, despite a series of hearings, trials and verdicts against the laboratory. PAIN therefore decides to put them face to face with their responsibilities without going through a court.
“I focused on the Sackler family, because it was a name that was familiar to me. I thought it was a family of generous patrons who supported artists I loved”explains Nan Goldin. “Then I realized how dirty their money was. I found out that they were the ones producing and selling the drug I had become addicted to”. In January 2018, Nan Goldin published a vitriolic column in Artforum entitled “Growing PAIN”, in which she explains the creation of the group and how the Sacklers managed, thanks to a clever “artwashing”, to use artistic patronage to restore their image and clear themselves of the death of hundreds of thousands of people . “For years, the Sacklers managed to separate their pharmaceutical empire from their reputation in the art world”explains Nan Goldin. “So we sought to put an end to this hypocrisy, to show who they really are and to link their name to the opiate crisis in everyone’s opinion”.
Goldin and PAIN then organized several large events in renowned museums which benefited from the funds of the Sacklers and sometimes even named exhibition halls in their name in thanks for their generosity. The Sackler family will never be judged, in particular because they voluntarily provoke the bankruptcy of Purdue Pharma, but Goldin and PAI N. manage to deprive them of all credibility and respectability in art circles. Now the world knows who they are and what they have done. “The fact that our action has had an impact on a multi-billion dollar company in the United States is my greatest pride”, rejoices Goldin. Today, PAIN continues to advocate for damages paid by the Sacklers and other pharmaceutical companies to be reinvested in health risk reduction measures and overdose prevention centers across the country. The organization also raises funds to support grassroots associations that work closely with communities affected by the epidemic, such as VOCAL-NY or Housing Works. She is also fighting to legalize safer consumption sites, to reduce the stigma around addiction and to rethink the war on drugs by avoiding all-prison.
From the moment she embarked on the PAIN adventure, Nan Goldin decided to make a film to document their meetings and their actions. For about a year and a half, PAIN therefore shot footage with the help of executive producers Clare Carter and Alex Kwartler, longtime collaborators of Goldin, before inviting the director Laura Breasts (Citizenfour, Oscar for best documentary in 2015) to join the project. A long-time admirer of Nan Goldin’s work, Laura Poitras was immediately won over: “In my films, I always paint the portrait of individuals who fight for a certain idea of justice and responsibility. Nan Goldin was one of them”.
As the project comes to life, it becomes apparent that even though PAIN remains the central theme, the film is the perfect opportunity to explore the links between Nan Goldin’s activism, life and work. She considers her work to be inherently politically subversive, due to the community of friends and collaborators she has chosen to celebrate and immortalize in her photographs and slideshows. As she explains in the film: “We don’t talk openly about the problems in our society, and that destroys people. All of my work is about social stigma, whether it’s about suicide, mental illness, or gender.”. For Nan Goldin, the film absolutely had to address the economic, societal and institutional parallels between the AIDS crisis and the opiate crisis. Social crises do not take place in a vacuum, and showing the relationship between the often stigmatized communities in which the photographer immersed herself and the personal stories that underpin her work was essential to grasping the true breadth of her work.
For nearly two years, Laura Poitras visited Nan Goldin at her home in Brooklyn, for a series of interviews which, combined with the artist’s slideshows and photographs, formed the backbone of the documentary. The recordings are sound only, and the production team ensures that they are used with the greatest care. Only a small circle of people including the director and the editing team have access to it. Nan Goldin has a say in the content, before certain personal details are shared with more collaborators or included in the final version of the film.
Particular care is given to the film’s music by Laura and Nan. The latter offers several of the pre-existing pieces heard in certain sequences and suggests that the New York experimental group Soundwalk Collective, which had recently collaborated with her on her work Memory Lost, wrote the soundtrack. This collective, led by Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli, is also known for its work with Patti Smith, with whom they designed the exhibition Evidence for the Pompidou Center.
Thanks to the work of the Nan Goldin Studio team and two dedicated archivists, Shanti Avirgan and Olivia Streisand, images shot by third parties are found and Laura Poitras manages to gather enough raw material for the film to transport us into the pass. It highlights in particular a major work by Goldin, Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls (2004), a three-screen installation dedicated to his late sister, Barbara Holly Goldin. The film’s title comes from Barbara’s response to a Rorschach test. By interweaving the story of Goldin’s childhood, his deep friendships within a community of artists embodying the creative impulse and his resilience in the face of the AIDS epidemic, All the beauty and the bloodshed captures snapshots from the past to portray an artist through her work, which is itself a reflection of her own life.
All the beauty and the bloodshed won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival (jury chaired by Julianne Moore). He received the award for best documentary 2022 from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the New York Films Critics Online… He is nominated for the Gotham Awards, the Critics Choice Awards, the Cinema Eye Honors, the British Film Independent Awards, etc.
