Toute la beauté et le sang versé

There's a family who had legalised addiction, who pushed their products to administer more affliction, once you're trapped it's hard to leave, there's a good chance that you'll grieve, if you know someone, they'll need more than benediction.

A wonderful piece of factual storytelling focused around Nan Goldin's pursuit of justice and recompense for those helplessly hooked on Oxycontin, a drug that was peddled without remorse by people who thought they were above the law. The film also explores in some detail the life of Nan, her career as an artist, the wild and colourful characters she got to know in NYC, and the often crazy things she found herself doing, as well as her life as a child and the sister she lost.

It still amazes me how evolved the documentary film genre has become over the years.

The amount of freedom you can experiment within a documentary has become more noticeable. In this one particularly, you see a bunch of different styles and even story branches.

There is a mix of themes such as topical activism, what can be classified as art, a determination for justice and accountability, a woman's struggling life and the power of family.

The central character I had no idea about and we certainly got a thorough look into her life both as an artist and as a daughter.

It felt very definitive as I felt it gave you the perfect portrait of this person's upbringing and how certain traumas lead to this groundbreaking change in the art world.

I also liked at how they told each aspect of her life in a parallel style. The timings of shift to a different part of her life felt well-timed and gave us a very satisfying conclusion.

This was pretty interesting and while I wasn't overwhelmed by it, I can see others feeling that way.

It's well made, the content and imagery is strong and the central character was not afraid to open herself up to her life story.

Laura Poitras' remarkable documentary ALL THE BEAUTY AND BLOODSHED which combines multiple story-lines into an incredible portrait of artist and activist, Nan Goldin. On the surface it appears as though the focus is on Goldin's attempt to bring to the public's attention the Sackler family's role as pharmaceutical kingpins during the opiod crisis. It begins with faux doctor's prescriptions and pill bottles raining down in a toney art gallery named after the Sacklers. It's a protest by Goldin's group P. A. I. N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now).

It's a powerful prologue, but, Poitras isn't simply interested in an advocacy documentary film here. It's a dense and intense exploration of Goldin, the person and the artist, and how her personal journey informed her activism.

Goldin is interviewed at length, and her personal writings and art are revealed in the most intimate manner. Goldin's photography evolved naturally. She was driven to document her own life and, from there, depicted an entire underground scene that had rarely been exposed to not only the art world - but, to the larger public. Goldin's fluid sexuality brought her to Provincetown and later the Burroughs of New York City, photographing everything and everyone she came in contact with. She never intentionally was putting together a portfolio - it just happened. The photographs are as private and personal as could be. Goldin never shied away from her innermost relationships, nor that of her circle of friends. That frankness is what eventually brought her to the recognition by the art world - even as it scandalized many of them. When AIDS hit her community, Goldin learned a lesson from the Act Up movement that carried on to her founding of P. A. I. N..

While all of that played out (eventually) in the public's eye, Poitras reveals Goldin's personal family life. Her strained relationship with her parents, and, most poignantly, of that with her sister who was institutionalized. Her sibling's story shows how a young woman's 'rebelliousness' can be struck down by the system and a forced dependency on drugs and a form of enslavement. It's something that Goldin carries with her to this day, including her own bout with opiods.

ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED carries a lot on its plate. Poirtras' great achievement here is that no section of the movie feels out of place, nor does any part of it feel in any manner slighted. It's all of a piece melding Goldin's intensely personal quest, art and sense of social purpose.

Breathtaking.

This documentary about Nan Goldin and her battles throughout her life--personally and professionally--is many pronged with New York as the background. She was part of the art movement in the 1980's when AIDS started to invade that scene unabated since the administration of the time felt it was only a gay disease and would not be addressed. Her anger could have been surmised as the beginning there, but then we got a glimpse of her life growing up with the poor treatment her sister got by her parents. Things progressed from there. Her activism developed in the 1980's and continued into the age of Purdue Pharmacy's creation and rampant spread of oxycodone. The documentary may seem to be a bit of a hodgepodge of memories, but when you understand that her anger was developing almost from the moment she was born, you can understand how heartfelt her concern was for those who died around her. This was nominated as Best Feature Documentary for the Oscars It is an uncomfortable yet quite informative watch.

The film attempts a profile of a photographer, but without laying groundwork to make the case for why she is, in thee filmmaker's perspective, a great artist. Viewers are shown a few slideshows of her work, images that are often uninteresting on their own -- without first being contextualized -- and then sequences of B-roll of the photographer shuffling around her studio and directing installations of her work. I got the the impression that if I were already enamored with the photographer, then I might have watched these sequences with rapt attention. Instead, knowing next to nothing about the artist, I found them boring -- and this was all within the first 15 minutes!

There are vastly more powerful films about photographers, searing works about the opioid epidemic, beautiful films about artistic process. This film intersects with each of those genres, but in an insubstantial and unmemorable way.

The buzz around this work -- and there is a lot of buzz -- seems rooted in the celebrity of the filmmaker and its subject. That's ironic, for the film appears to seek its power from themes larger than any individual, yet winds up relevant only if underpinned by the fame surrounding its maker and central character. Like the reviewer here PedroPires90 wrote ("Unfocused," March 3, 2023), "honestly it was hard to find the strength to finish it."