All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

A documentary about a photographer and a campaign. Nan Goldin became known in the eighties. She photographed her own circle in New York: friends, lovers, night life, illness and death. The documentary runs two lines together. The first is her life. She tells it herself; her own photographs run over her voice. Her childhood is heavy. Her sister Barbara lived in an institution and killed herself young; the family did not speak of it for years. Nan left home early. Then Boston, then New York. The camera is a recording instrument. She stages nothing and beautifies no one, herself included. A generation dies in the eighties. Aids takes most of her friends and the narrative gives that section name by name. The second line is the present. Goldin came off an addiction to a painkiller and founded a group. The group's target is a family. The Sacklers own the company that made the drug and have had their name put on museums. From there the documentary is a story of action. Sit-ins in museum halls, prescriptions thrown, banners and court. The museums take the name down one by one. What the narrative is interested in is not art but silence: its idea is that what her family kept quiet about her sister and what institutions kept quiet about the drug are the same silence. The structure comes from Goldin's own slide shows. Sequences of photographs, music and a narrating voice. Laura Poitras does not intervene. The camera is inside the actions and nobody is directed. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2022 and was nominated for the documentary Oscar. Who it is for: anyone who likes the history of photography, activism and personal documentary. Who it is not for: anyone looking for distance; the narrative is built entirely on Goldin's view and the other side has no voice.