“Photography was always a way to walk through fear,” says Nan Goldin in her raspy voice as photos fill the screen. Nuzzled within the textures of the snapshots live friends, lovers, and drifters, all eternally preserved through the eyes of the consecrated artist who rose to prominence in the 80s thanks to her visual chronicling of queer life and culture in New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Her 1986 magnum opus, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependence” — named after a song in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” — became a reference for vulnerable, autobiographical work in photography, reframing the ever-shifting lines between private and public within art.
READ MORE: Venice Film Festival Preview: 16 Must-See Films To Watch
In ‘Ballad,’ people drink and smoke and sleep and fuck and love and exist fully, freely. Goldin’s generous eye does away with the impersonal notion of the subject. The people in the photos are whole; a split-second turned lifetime when processed through the shutter. The lens sees Nan, too, with the artist rooted in the understanding that truth lies in dialogue; one should take only what they can give (“The wrong things are kept private in society, and it destroys people,” she exclaims at one point). This, of course, requires a level of openness diametrically opposite to the human instinct for self-preservation. Once the walls are down, who then guards the castle?
This is one of the questions at the center of Laura Poitras’ new documentary, “All The Beauty and the Bloodshed,” a film structured as two. One is a poignant account of Goldin’s life, from her plagued childhood as the daughter of emotionally inept parents to her blossoming as an artist while nestled in the loving arms of the New York LGBTQIA+ community, a story told mainly through the juxtaposition of archival images and first-person testimonials and featuring watershed figures of the likes of actress Cookie Mueller and artist David Wojnarowicz. The other film happens in the present day and chronicles Nan’s fight against the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, the makers of Oxycontin, a prescription drug directly related to the opioid epidemic in the United States.
READ MORE: Fall 2022 Preview: 60+ Must-See Films To Watch
After surviving a near-fatal fentanyl overdose, the photographer founded Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N), a group dedicated to seeking accountability for the manufacturers behind the opioid crisis. Art plays a vital role in this quest as, by the time of the group’s insurgence, the Sackler name was prominently displayed on donor wings across some of the most prestigious galleries and museums in the world. It became one of P.A.I.N.’s greatest missions, then, to harness Goldin’s illustrious standing within the art scene to permanently remove the Sackler name from institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris.
Having these two storylines run parallel provides for both disconnect and whiplash, a narrative choice that emphasizes what Goldin beautifully labels “the darkness of the soul” — to be plagued to feel everything while concurrently condemned to nihilistic numbness. As the cadence of Nan’s words slows down to frame despair, people disappear from her photographs. Summer trips by the lake and winters made warmer in overpacked studios dissolve into fields consumed by snow, daylight drained by the rusty windows of creaking old houses. Bleak landscapes are made vaster by solitude, the lens expanding to accommodate the all-engulfing enormousness of emptiness.
As Poitras ping-pongs between these two Nans, it is this very vastness that seems to best encapsulate grief. The grief of loss, of endings, of could-have-beens. The grief of parents who were made to watch as prescription slips morphed into death sentences, friends who wore the same suits to weddings and funerals, and sisters eternally doomed to search for answers in fading diaries. [A-]
Follow along with all our coverage of the 2022 Venice Film Festival.
