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For the first time, Autostraddle is at the Toronto International Film Festival! Drew Gregory is coming to you for the next two weeks with all the LGBTQ+ films at one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. Follow her on Twitter for more.
In the summer of 2015, I wandered into The Whitney alone. As if in a trance, I found myself in a dark room off to the side, a slide show projected on the wall. Image after image captivated me and I ended up spending the entire afternoon looking and re-watching in awe. This slide show was Nan Goldin’s breakthrough The ballad of sexual addiction.
At the time I said it connected with me because the visual language was perfect for my next film. And it’s true that I would give DP a Pinterest board filled with Goldin’s photos and credit Goldin. But when I came out a year and a half later, I realized that my connection to her work went deeper than lighting. She is a queer woman and she documented her queer community. I had seen images of queer people, trans people before, but never through the eyes of someone who loved them. It was a look I felt called to emulate.
Laura Poitras’ remarkable documentary All the beauty and the bloodshed is about Nan Goldin and her work — it’s also about Goldin’s campaign to take down the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, the company that made Oxycontin. The brilliance of the film is that it shows that these aspects of her life are one in the same.
If Nan Goldin is a superhero, then this movie is her origin story. Poitras has created a layered portrait that reveals the kind of woman who, instead of resting on her laurels in the art world, would spend her days organizing against the family that created and profited from the opioid crisis. It begins with Goldin’s sister, who was institutionalized as a teenager for being queer, which eventually led to her suicide. It then explores Goldin’s own queerness and the community of outsiders who become her chosen family. It covers her time as a sex worker, her experience with domestic violence, her personal challenges with addiction and her activism in the fight against AIDS.
Before all this leads to Sacklers, it leads to her art. Goldin started taking pictures because it was the only way she felt comfortable interacting with the world after her traumatic childhood. She took pictures of the people she knew – the queer people she knew – and captured their lives as an insider. Through intimate audio interviews with Goldin, the context behind the work is explained. But it’s all there on the screen in the pictures. The intimacy, the joy, the pain.
Goldin says she always wanted her friends to like the photos she took of them, so that it would feel like a collaboration. This film feels like the return of Poitras. She’s not making a documentary about Goldin, she’s making a documentary with Goldin.
And what Goldin cares about most right now is the Sacklers. Through the fascinating, personal look at Goldin’s life and art is the work of her group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). It covers the die-ins and other demonstrations they do at museums that take Sackler money and display the Sackler name. It shows their attempt to prevent the Sacklers from declaring bankruptcy while keeping billions. It shows the details and challenges of effective organization.
Goldin fights the Sacklers, but she fights even harder to change what our culture keeps secret. She wants drug users to have access to safe injection sites. She wants billionaires not to have their reputations protected by philanthropy. She wants sexuality not to be hidden. She wants sex work not to be stigmatized. She wants to take pictures of her face covered in bruises and put it in a museum.
When discussing her transwomen friends, she says that for them, survival was an art. For Goldin, the same has proven true. She became a photographer to survive, and her artistic practice has continued to document that survival. She has lost so many, fought so hard for those who remain. She has remained principled in an unprincipled world.
Goldin’s victories against the Sacklers were always going to be small. In real life, David does not kill Goliath – at best, he wounds him. And yet this film shows that we have to keep trying for the small victories. For Goldin, for all of us, there must be beauty amidst the bloodshed.
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