REVIEW: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed [2022]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 113 minutes
Release Date: December 2nd, 2022 (USA)
Studio: Neon
Director(s): Laura Poitras

It’s easy to turn your life into a story, but it’s harder to maintain real memories.

Someone in Laura Poitras’ documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed explains how there’s so much going on inside a Nan Goldin photograph that she could change each image’s meaning simply by altering its position inside one of her famed slideshows. You could say the same about this film and its director’s ability to weave together bits and pieces of an expansive life to deliver important commentary on the politics of art, institutional complicity, and the responsibility mankind must shoulder to ever find itself at peace with the tragic truths of its history. This could have simply been a portrait of an artist or a spotlight on Goldin’s activism against the Sackler family for spearheading the opioid crisis. It instead proves a forum for the voiceless to scream.

And it starts with Nan’s sister Barbara who committed suicide after being sent away to institutions by their parents for daring to live as a lesbian. By refusing to believe the gaslighting that went on to whitewash her death as an accident, Golden was able to not only endure her own hardships (being thrown out of every home she was sent to once her parents were warned she might kill herself too if she stayed) but she’s also able to bring Barbara’s to light decades later. Because if she had found a community steeped in love like her younger sister did with drag queens and LGBTQ icons, she might still be alive today.

A slideshow itself of still images and videos both taken by and starring Golden, the film’s chaptered structure hinges on the work of her organization P.A.I.N. to hold the Sacklers accountable by targeting their philanthropy in the arts via museum donations (most of which house a Nan Goldin work in their permanent collection). It’s through that journey that we then go back in time to learn of her life in Boston and New York, her friends (Cookie Mueller and David Wojnarowicz among them), and her candid work depicting domestic abuse, the AIDS crisis, and more. Every step is narrated by Nan with intent. Every image accompanied by song or voice to augment its power.

Some moments might be triggering (photos of trauma and accounts of survivors that the Sacklers were legally obligated to hear as a condition of their settlement) while others will be labeled obscene (nudity and sex is common), but it’s also all an authentic depiction of life in this country and the difficulty of surviving beneath the oppressive forces of family, government, and wealth. To hear Nan speak about her own addiction and why, like every other issue brought up, the opioid epidemic hits so close to home is to feel like change is possible. Her words and this movie look to break through the silence of repression and fear to ensure the next generations have the tools to survive.