Film Review: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Director: Laura Poitras
Starring: Nan Goldin
Running time: 116 minutes

All The Beauty and The Bloodshed is an impactful investigation of the sustained conflict between the art communities' unflinching plea to moral righteousness and the monumental greed of the Sackler pharmaceutical company. 

The documentary can be split into two overlapping junctions; protest and personhood. Over the course of two hours director Laura Poitras provides an unfiltered insight into Goldin's struggle against the suffering caused at the hands of the American opioid crisis. It is the early 80’s. It is the late 90’s. It is the new millennium and morality is out of fashion, replaced, superseded, forcibly removed by Big Pharma. 

Shots taken from a variety of political protests fronted by anti-oxy support group "P.A.I.N" use art as a means to intensify the individual sufferings of the collective. The viewer watches as the support group plans lofty, high-risk protests together, celebrate wins and commiserate losses together. The rawness of human interaction is ingrained into this documentary and with a poignant style of shooting that lends itself to a highly emotional viewing experience.

These political interludes reveal themselves less so under the guise of a factual learning process that is so established and ingrained into the contemporary documentary structure, and acts more so as a honest uncovering of prestigious museums and galleries; looking into how the frameworks of these cultural institutes have been eclipsed by monetary gain. It is revealed that the Sackler family name has tactfully embedded itself into the fiscal roots of these epicentres of culture and heritage; making it increasingly difficult for political activists to find opportunity to appropriately target these pillars of moral, medicinal evil without disrupting artful appreciation. 

A series of 35mm film shots from Nan Goldin’s slideshow exhibition "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" (1886) provide breaks against the exploration of the emotionally devastating consequences of the opioid crisis. In these segments, Nan narrates her photography with anecdotes detailing the turbulence of her emotional life. From; suicidal ideation, domestic abuse, and her own struggles with opium. The merging of anecdote and art provides a particularly raw duplication of Nan’s most intimate world. 

In all art, but particularly photography, we assume that there has to be some conscious construction that exaggerates the aesthetically attractive. There is always a purpose to a position. But there is a certain, paradoxical, quiet obtrusiveness about the photographs of Nan Goldin. The people she photographs, the struggles she accentuates. It is an art work like no other. Poitras, utilizes the intricate honesty of Goldin’s work to weave and accentuate the disjuncture between the Sackler Families embellishment of the truth versus the unflinching integrity of Goldin's photography. 

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is not only a portrait of an artist, but a portrait of an activist. It is subtle, it is highly evocative and it is a masterfully made sociological spectacle detailing the complex emotional devastation caused by the opioid crisis, whilst simultaneously reflecting on the final phase of Nan Goldin's illustrious career. 

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is now showing at Broadway Cinema