How Art Fought Greed… and Won
Laura Poitras’ Golden Lion winning documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed sinks us into the tumultuous opioid addiction of internationally renowned photographer Nan Goldin - and how she used her profile to fight one of the pharmaceutical industry’s wealthiest villains.
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2 years ago
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (USA, 122 min, Laura Poitras). The life of internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin is told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.
Who doesn’t love a David vs. Goliath story? Cheering for the underdog is basically an Aussie pastime - and this one’s a doozy. First, you gotta imagine our plucky David as a flame-headed septuagenarian armed not with a club, but a camera. And our Goliath? It’s not just one monster, but a secretive family who’ve amassed a fortune worth tens of billions, and donated millions of it to some of the most prestigious museums and galleries around the globe.
Anyone who’s binged Dopesick starring Michael Keaton, or read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe will know the infamous Sackler name. Radden Keefe describes them as “a dynasty… the name ‘Sackler’ adorns the walls of many storied institutions – Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences… and for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis.”
Okay, Goliath locked in. As for David, our hero over the 2-hour runtime of All the Beauty is Nancy “Nan” Goldin, the award-winning photographer, activist and advocate whose work across decades has explored subcultures of sexuality, drugs and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Critics have summarised Goldin's skill at “capturing intimate moments and raw emotions with a striking honesty and vulnerability. Her work is a powerful, deeply human celebration of life, a testament to the power of art to illuminate the beauty and pain of the human experience…” (check out this great A-Z explainer from Dazed for a quick guide to all things Goldin).
So those are our fighters. The stage is set. Let the battle begin.
What is All the Beauty and the Bloodshed about?
Short answer: a whole lot. Nancy Goldin had a troubled upbringing - her parents were harsh, judgemental and (it’s hinted) coping with mental health traumas of their own. Nan’s older sister Barbara took her own life at age 18 by lying down on the railroad tracks near their family home. Unable to cope, Nan’s parents placed their remaining daughter into foster care. You can only begin to get a sense of the profound feelings of displacement and loss that Nan suffered in these early years… she was just 14 years old. It was eventually photography that saved her, and her nascent talent blossomed into a unique and some say, stark and raw eye for the intimate.
Where does all this tie into prescription opioid addiction and abuse, you ask? Like countless thousands of others, Goldin’s dark journey with opioids began innocently, when she suffered a wrist injury and was prescribed Oxycontin after surgery. Nearly immediately, she was hooked, eventually experiencing a near-fatal overdose of Fentanyl. The brush with death galvanised Goldin into action: she founded the advocacy group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2017. With her links to the art world, Goldin aimed her arrows at targets she knows well. P.A.I.N. specifically focuses on museums and other arts institutions, with the goal of holding them accountable for their collabs with the Sackler family and their financial support of the arts. Ultimately, P.A.I.N. want to strip away the smokescreen that the Sackler’s hide behind with their charity - and bring them to some kind of justice.
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What causes does All the Beauty and the Bloodshed explore?
Poitras’ doco is wide-reaching, covering LGBTQIA+ issues (Goldin is bisexual), the HIV-AIDS epidemic (she lost countless friends to the disease) and the bohemian arts scene (she’s been described as “having virtually invented” the heroin chic genre, which she refutes, describing it as “reprehensible”). But clearly, the film’s agenda is in lockstep with Goldin’s own: to expose the Sackler family and their flagrant and immoral pushing of opioids down the throats of millions of Americans.
“Quite simply mesmerising… it shows that art can, quite literally, change the world.”
~ THE SUN
This crisis has seen a sharp increase in the use of opioids (prescription painkillers, heroin, and synthetic opioids like fentanyl), and a matching spike in overdose deaths. And by “sharp”, we mean staggering: according to the American Center for Disease Control and Prevention, over half a million in the US died from opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2019. Worse, the problem is accelerating, not fading: 2020 saw over 93,000 overdose deaths in the United States, a record high; opioids were involved in nearly three-quarters of these deaths. And as we know, Goldin herself was very nearly one of them.
How will All the Beauty and the Bloodshed make me feel?
Poitras’ portrait is a complex film. Fans of niche photo-essay analysis will be in heaven; the hundreds of examples of Goldin’s photographic output (underlaid with her detailed narration) packs more into these 2 hours than an entire bachelor’s degree of art school tutorials (don’t @ us, art tutors!). It’s a frank and florid ride through the grungy, bohemian New York arts scene of the 80’s, which may or may not be your jam. But the present day side of the film is incredibly arresting. We see the flashmob-style museum protests that Goldin and her P.A.I.N. group kicked off in 2018, showering the hushed spaces with thousands of empty pill bottles and prescription papers at NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, then taking their message to other iconic art institutions like the Louvre and the Guggenheim Museum.
“There are few political queer artists as important as Nan Goldin, and Poitras’ documentary takes you through the life of an incendiary photographer who spoke her truth because she absolutely had to.”
~ FILMINK
Spoiler incoming: it’s also incredibly satisfying to witness the court-ordered video linkup where two members of the Sackler family finally face reprisal. They sit stony faced, as they’re forced to hear testimony about the devastation that their prescription medication caused to those who lost loved ones through overdose. You’ll be scanning their faces for any trace of remorse. Whether you find any is one of the bigger human questions this documentary will leave you mulling.
A footnote: in March 2021, US President Biden announced $1.5 billion in American Rescue Plan funding to address the opioid epidemic. Welcome news, with a bitter irony: this figure is less than 15% of the amount the Sackler family are still worth today.
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