I spoke of poets and journeymen in my review for 2022’s third best documentary, the visually stunning All That Breathes; about documentarians who structure their films to inform cleanly and those ones who delve into the essence of their subject matter to make documentaries that transcend the merely educational and become cinematically arresting. Though I very much like Laura Poitras’ bombshell Edward Snowden documentary from 2014, Citizenfour (it ages well even if one of its key players, Green Greenwald, very much doesn’t), I probably had her figured more for a thoughtful assembler of non-fiction essays than a dazzling poet of the genre. That film was as smoothly competent as you would want a film about the Snowden NSA leak to be. It didn’t call for a lot of stylistic brio. And yet, here Poitras is edging out the year’s most cinematically sumptuous documentary (and movie, period) and placing in one of my top twenties for the second time in less than a decade. And, while Citizenfour was visually unadorned, Poitras’ partnering with photographer subject Nan Golden has unlocked a host of untapped visual verve I never knew she had. I never thought Poitras was a mere journeyman, but her dizzyingly artful, peerlessly edited All the Beauty and the Bloodshed lays waste to the idea that there is anything the least bit pedestrian or perfunctory about her. When you hold All the Beauty (dense, visually observant, luminously hard-scrabble) up next to Citizenfour (subtle, journalistic, lucid), as different as they may seem, I think what you find is that Poitras is an agile, intuitive documentary chameleon. She knows how to empathize and identify with her subject closely enough that she figures out hos their story should be presented. Poitras is out to do much more than just inform her audience, but her ace in the hole is an understated versatility. The ability to tailor the style to the substance. Figuring out how to visualize the story means understanding, on a deep level, what the story essentially is, and Poitras walks so closely with her subject that you almost forget she’s there. Contact‘s Dr. Ellie Arroway may have said they should have sent a poet. B ut if you want a documentary that is smart, and unobtrusively cinematic, you could do a whole lot worse than sending a Poitras.
I place a premium on things like cohesion and thematic tightness, but let’s have a heart cheer for messy cinema. That is not to say that All the Beauty and the Bloodshed doesn’t say lot of intelligent things very lucidly. But it is, in so many ways, the movie its title promises, one bursting at the seams with life in all its overflowing agonies and joys. In telling the story of the queer counter-cultural visual artist and photographer Nan Goldin, whose career has now spanned six decades from the post-Stonewall LGBT scene of 1970s and early 1980s New York through the AIDS epidemic to the present day, where Goldin (who nearly died from a prescription overdose) has become the leading general fighting the opioid crisis, Poitras tells a story with enough narrative detail to wash away clean themes and story beats. Her film is a torrent of emotions and grace notes, an entire life lived in the course of a couple hours. In her later years, Goldin has fought tirelessly to reduce the harm of opioids and hold the epidemics’ cruel billionaire architects, the Sackler family, accountable. The Sacklers have long put their considerable riches into prestigious museums (including The Louvre and New York City’s Guggenheim), which has allowed them to publicly cleanse their toxic reputation and become celebrated patrons of the high art world. Goldin’s recent triumphs have seen her withhold her prized artwork from any gallery, museum or institution that places the Sackler surname on their buildings and wings. As part of the artistic community that gave a voice to countless AIDS victims, Goldin helped to popularize the phrase “silence kills”, and as a photographer who made queer and trans people the subjects of her work, she well understands the anguish of being nameless, anonymous. The genius of her late career mission (marshaled by her opioid non-profit PAIN) has been to weaponize that anonymity and turn it back on the most loathsome abusers ever seen. She knows that, like most humans, what the Sacklers crave is to be respected and thought of. Just having obscene amounts of capital is not enough for them. She knows this because, as a friend of some of the first queer people to battle their way out of America’s closets, she experienced what it feels like to be denied that same visibility. Poitras once again has an immensely compelling protagonist on her hands and she knows a pinch of salt is all that’s needed to get their full flavor. In this case, she has the two things she needs to make her movie dynamic: Goldin’s treasure trove of stunning photography and her humane, confident, piercingly urbane voice. The right person to tell the Nan Goldin story is so obviously Nan Goldin, and Laura Poitras gives her all she needs and not one one thing more; not one extraneous filmmaking flourish. This messy sprawl of a life story is paradoxically sharp and tight.
Bob Dylan once sang (in a rare moment of being completely complimentary to a woman), “She’s got everything she needs. She’s an artist.” I’ve always like that idea of the artist, not just as a talented explorer of some specific medium but as a person with the empathy and intelligence to find value wherever they go in the world. For Nan Goldin, art is not merely her photography but everything she’s ever done to make her life and the lives of good people around her better. It’s her way of beautifying her surroundings and it’s also been her means of survival in a society that bullies and devalues the non-heteronormative. and the neuro-atypical. The first sad chapter in Nan’s origin story is about how she lost her beloved older sister to suicide, all because her repressive suburban family couldn’t overcome its own ignorance and mental illness. Nan found a camera just as she was shipped away to foster care and it saved both her life and her considerable wits. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is about making art with every fiber of your being, which is why Goldin’s opioid activism is just as much a work of artistic genius as her powerful collections of photography. They are both ways of recognizing the victimized and censuring the oppressive. All the Beauty presents Goldin’s entire fraught life (social ward, queer and impoverished outsider, abuse survivor and opioid victim) as a gorgeous, artful testament to surviving. This is why Poitras’ film has to be so sprawling and discursive. It sees no clear lines of division between what the artist creates and how the artist lives. An artist like Goldin lives out their art as surely as they make art in order to live. Seeing the jaw-dropping gamut of life experiences Goldin has lived through (and how many culture-shifting American epochs she helped influence) is impossibly moving. In telling the story of a stigmatized subversive, Poitras captures Nan’s gritty irrepressible spirit while slyly making a film to get our spirits soaring Goldin is too sardonically punk to be in some standard-issue feel-good documentary and Poitras marries the form of her film to that tattered, hard-scrabble aesthetic. But, please do not tell Nan Goldin I used such a schmaltzy word, her story and the film around it is absolutely the best kind of inspiring. Under the bruises and grime, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed has maybe the most enormous heart of 2023 film.
Like Nan’s sexually frank feminist photography books, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is moved by a transcendentally lusty spirit. It is a profane work of genius. Nan’s art is not only inspired by survival but by a spirit of raucous tenacity that comes from finding life outside of a mainstream society that threw you away. Goldin laughs at how she used to relish being shunned from the group homes her parents exiled her to. “I made an art of it,” she observes with characteristic dryness. Her art captured people like her who had been scuffed up and devalued and rejected, and it found a soaring, defiant grace and beauty in their determination to exist and persevere. The bloodshed of the film’s title is the trauma, psychological abuse and premature death that wracked Goldin’s various communities and came close to destroying Nan herself. Having watched her own gracious, intelligent sister and so many others suffer and succumb to societal ignorance gave her a gift of vision and awareness. From the straitjacket of 1950’s suburbia to the rampant homophobia of the 1970s and 1980s (which has only gotten marginally better at concealing itself in the ensuing years) to the more than 500,000 victims of the Sacklers’ misinformation campaigns, Golden sees the truest artistic value in calling bullshit on anyone who tries to suppress truth and the voices of others. The spirit of punk rock sprouted like clover from the muck and garbage of 70’s and 80’s New York City (and other places too) and, whether one wants to call Goldin strictly punk or any other name that fits the eclectic range of artistic scenes she frequented, her boisterously defiant ethos conveys all that punk stands for. The furious belly laugh of people who have truth and love and art on their sides and are ready to scream it at the top of their lungs. Nan Godin’s art is a full-throated rebel yell and Laura Poitras’ film backs her like a quiet supportive friend with a subversive gleam in her eye. Poitras may seem like a humble, rigorous student next to the anything goes attitude of Goldin, but, by the end, she feels as ready to hurl a brick as anybody.
Of course, the punk trappings of Nan Goldin and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed have little to do with the Sex Pistols or the Ramones or anything literally punk. If anything, the sensibilities of Goldin and her queer artistic community feel more in line with the enigmatic dankness of the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol. What the punk aesthetic at its best represents is the struggle of those on the margins; trans people, queer people, women and non-whites. Goldin’s story is that of a suburban Jewish misfit who narrowly escaped a death of the soul and crawled through social welfare hell until she found her true community. Nan says of her first New York friends and roommates, “They were running away from America and they found each other.” The same is true of Nan herself. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is about art not just as a protective cloak that outsiders can wear but also a kind of homing beacon; a means of identifying good, kindred souls. People who want to love you, not belittle and chip away at you. Back when she was still a teenager in group homes, almost too traumatized to speak out loud, Nan made friends with a closeted gay youth named David. She helped him make his way out of the closet and, in return, he gave her her name: Nan. In the world All the Beauty, art is a means of travel to the places where we truly belong. It helps keep the monsters at bay and draws our true families toward us. Poitras has put together a painful but staggeringly life-affirming journey out of the wasteland of Space Age nuclear family America, to its vibrant, subversive center. To the places that would nurture and inspire some of the greatest photographs, paintings, music and cinema of all time. To the heart of America’s cultural awakening. And, when you look at the full tapestry of it, you see so much of Nag Goldin’s experience writ repeatedly. Persecuted, queer and unorthodox kids flee their private hells, author new stories for themselves and liv long enough to see their art reshape the face of American culture. The rumble they create is even felt, to some extent, back in the very mainstream enclaves they once fled. But who really cares what makes an impact in those mean, forsaken deserts anyway. The time to seek validation and acceptance there passed long ago.
While they are very different films, Poitras’ documentary could have also been titled Everything Everywhere All At Once. It is a film about connections and interconnectedness; between artistic scenes and eras, between art and life, and between the past and the present. Life experiences of years gone by echo in the present. Old friends return when we need them most, and our relationships see their meanings change and deepen as the story goes on. Life gives us material to make art and people learn that, through making art, they have been giving themselves valuable strategies for surviving. My favorite single scene in the film comes when Goldin and her PAIN colleagues organize a publicity event at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. The jaw-dropping visual conceit is to have people in the upper decks of the gallery drop down pamphlets full of chilling opioid statistics onto the museum floor, all done up to look like prescription slips. The moving image Goldin creates of hundreds of pamphlets falling down like snow from fifty feet above us is as dynamic and cinematically overwhelming as just about any sequence in 2022 cinema. Nan Goldin’s technical talent (for photographic image-making) is beyond doubt, but what strikes you is her conceptual brilliance. The ability to think of the world in pictures, movement and ideas is what true artists have. For all the Sacklers’ pretentions as art patrons, Nan Goldin lays waste to the lie that they have any actual art in their souls. Their crimes against thousands are despicable enough but Goldin is repulsed at the perversion of art the Sackler name represents. Art is an illuminating fire of righteous truth. Nan weaponizes real art to turn it back on these frauds with all the furious indignation of a person who’s spent years staring down abusers and hypocrites. Six decades into a brilliant career, we have the joy of watching Nan Goldin fully metamorphize into an avenging super hero. Watching that blizzard of damning leaflets flutter down on a crowd of art lovers, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Goldin would probably make a hell of a filmmaker if she ever tired her hand at it. Like I say, she’s got everything she needs.