The film “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” by Laura Poitras about Nan Goldin – culture

With her camera, Nan Goldin created images that returned sovereignty and a sparkling, almost aristocratic beauty to contemporary portraits. Her recording “Jimmy Paulette after the Parade” (1991) shows a crossdresser in his golden bikini top, his bleached hair disheveled, and his mouth glowing garnet red from his powdered face. His gaze from under the turquoise-blue lids is just as cool and dignified as that of, for example, Thomas Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” (1770) – he looks back just as majestically from the portrait. A privilege that for a long time was only granted to kings, great thinkers – or artists.

In the early 1980s, however, Nan Goldin had strippers, gays, drug addicts, sex workers and transvestites pose beautifully and proudly in front of her lens – and she made it clear that she belonged as an artist. One of the most shocking subjects of her slide series The Ballad of Sexual Addiction was her own bruised, swollen face. She was queer, too, addicted to heroin, sex worker and underdog.

Nan Goldin is no longer an underdog. Her achievements are worth a film that immediately won the Golden Lion in Venice and was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, directed by Laura Poitras. Poitras is an artist and director herself. She previously won an Oscar for “Citizenfour,” a documentary about Edward Snowden. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” will be released in German cinemas in May. But is it really a documentary?

Nan Goldin, who was born in Washington in 1953, has achieved a lot as an artist: her photographs illustrated and munitioned the struggle of American AIDS activists, gays and queers in the spheres of high culture. At the same time, the prints were traded at high prices and placed prominently in museums and galleries.

Above all, however, and this is at the center of the film, she has led a fight against the Sackler dynasty of patrons, accompanied by extraordinary media attention, in recent years, motivated by her own suffering: After an operation on her wrist, she was routinely prescribed the drug Oxycontin like millions of Americans. Just like them, they quickly became addicted. The opioid, manufactured by Purdue Pharma, became one of the most dangerous drugs around in the United States, and the Sackler family, who owned Purdue, made their fortunes from aggressive marketing.

The counterattack by the artist and her activists from “PAIN” (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), who rained down recipes like confetti in the museum foyer at vernissages or distributed medicine bottles in the antique rooms of archaeological institutes, did not only consist in establishing a debate. But in poisoning the names of the profiteers, driving them out of the museums and galleries that had given them donations, endowments, extensions and donations. In the end, museum empires such as London’s Tate, the National Gallery, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum and London’s V&A broke away from the Sacklers.

It was their images that gave Nan Goldin the power to take on the Sacklers

Will the triumph of activist Goldin be followed by the success of Poitras as chronicler of a David versus Goliath story? It may well be – but the film certainly raises questions about a genre that is becoming more and more popular: the radically subjective documentary film, the subject of which is the boss himself. Nan Goldin produced it himself. “It’s my voice that tells my story in my pictures, so above all it had to be true for me, it had to express what I want to say,” Goldin said in an interview.

As a genre, the type of documentary artists’ film to which “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” belongs is still comparatively young. It took a long time for film and video artists to find the impartiality they needed to use the camera as subjectively as they used a pen, brush, and chisel. Nan Goldin had definitely paved the way for this development with her slide series. At the end of the 1990s, video monitors and projection screens brought a new realism to the visual arts, which, according to Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 in 2002, had to be considered canonized: Room after room in the Fridericianum was filled with moving images that reported on civil wars and showed former battlefields or industrial ruins. They were artistic works that understood themselves as realism in the wake of Gustave Courbet. But it was also understood as a counter-shot to the quick images of the journalists and documentarists. The artists weren’t looking for ratings, but for biennials and themed shows, and of course for a place on museum walls and in art history.

Two decades later – and more than forty years after Goldin’s first slide shows – the distribution of images has perpetuated itself. Cinema screen, “Tagesschau” monitor and Biennale pavilion were once far apart. In the era of Netflix, Youtube and Tiktok, everything on the same screen is crammed together. What was and what is true often enough disappears in the no man’s land between what were once strictly demarcated media.

However, this also means that many rules or conventions are no longer applicable: checking facts, asking the accused, embedding them in a larger context, to name just a few. Of course, this new “artistic freedom” also has its own limits, but the fact that the sounding out is increasingly being left to lawyers and the story is spared differentiating moments speaks for itself.

In fact, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” initially looks just like journalism or documentary. Only better, of course. Because Goldin and Poitras paste together an evocative collage of music and archive footage, featuring early friends like Cookie Mueller, David Armstrong and Jim Jarmusch, to the sound of The Velvet Underground and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, which Goldin once used to underline their slide shows. Underground strips, photos of off-spaces, beach pictures and again and again parties and fumbling and sex are snippets. A one and a half hour clip in which the artist’s biographical meandering almost inevitably leads to a violent attack.

One almost overlooks the fact that in the frenzy of storytelling it is not about the matter itself – for example the interdependencies between capital, the pharmaceutical industry, philanthropy, public education or state funding for the arts. Quotations from the other side, reliable statistics, an analysis of the American health system, for example, would only interrupt the flow. The fact that the film also ignores other protests – for example the activists who long before Goldin attacked art events and institutions such as Tate for their cooperation with BP or Shell – is unforgivable and violates any journalistic or documentary ethos. The Sacklers are not confronted, instead memos are quoted and company strategies are outlined, and in the end a few offspring helplessly confront the activists of PAIN in a zoom conference.

The subject of “artwashing” comes up, but then it falls short

One of the most enlightening moments is the too-short sequence depicting how family patriarch Arthur Sackler strategically viewed art and philanthropy as the other side of dirty money. “Artwashing” is now a well-established term in the USA. But the big perspective is not opened after all.

The greatest omission, however, is that Laura Poitras allows the artist to push herself in front of her own work. The overwhelming, extraordinary beauty of these recordings, the selection of their motifs, their staging, but also their deep connection with the fine arts – “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” should not have failed to analyze this. Instead of really pointing it out, the camera glides over life and work until one appears as a somehow visceral outpouring of the other. Just no tables. No timelines. No other stage names.

But if you want to understand why the artist “David” is successful in this myth in her fight against the “Goliaths”, the museum establishment and the pharmaceutical industry, then you can’t get around the pictures. These historically clever, politically alert and deeply reflected images alone have turned the drug-addicted underdog with the camera into one of the most important artists of all, who is honored by museum directors. Your oeuvre is obviously more valuable for museums and the art world than even the most potent patrons. Laura Poitras was probably the only one who understood that – and passed her Golden Lion on to Nan Goldin the day after the award ceremony. Whether that means that she has also understood that her film does not deserve to be called a documentary film, that would also be another question.