All the Beauty and the Bloodshed: The Highest Stakes

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a skillful and intuitive film about how one extraordinary woman makes medicine out of poison; it is also a materially realistic film about how poison has been represented as medicine. For several decades, Goldin dealt with addiction and recovery, a pattern rooted in her experience of abandonment, repressive parents, her older sister Barbara’s suicide, and one significantly violent relationship. She has never hid these formative traumas in her life or her art. Instead, she has channeled them through celebrated bodies of work about drag queens (The Other Side) and the avant-garde of 1980s New York City (The Ballad of Sexual Dependency)—the latter of which includes a self-portrait of Goldin with a broken eye socket, taken after she was battered by a boyfriend. The revelations she draws from her subjects, including herself, are facilitated by her personal honesty.

In her sixties, Goldin found herself relapsing into a debilitating opioid addiction, after being prescribed OxyContin in 2014 for a wrist surgery. An almost lethal overdose propelled her into treatment. While in recovery, she became aware that the producer of OxyContin—Purdue Pharma—was owned by one family, the Sacklers. Of course she knew their name; they were major donors in the art world, one of Goldin’s primary arenas, and had created a shield of decency around themselves through their philanthropy. The huge amounts of money that the Sacklers donated to museums were earned, in part, through sales of OxyContin to the tune of thirty-five billion dollars.

Poitras’s next two films completed what she refers to as her post-9/11 trilogy: The Oath (2010) follows a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden named Abu Jandal and his brother-in-law Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was unconstitutionally prosecuted by the U.S. government and held as a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay; and the Oscar-winning Citizenfour (2014) chronicles Edward Snowden’s process of revealing the illegal mass-surveillance practices of the National Security Agency. She continued her focus on politically controversial figures with Risk (2017), a portrait of the now-incarcerated WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange that deftly navigates his complex legacy as a man with harmful attitudes toward women and as a journalist who has upheld the highest values of a free press.

Goldin and Poitras both put themselves on the line in their work but have almost polar-opposite approaches to documenting the world. Goldin’s art is largely individual in focus; it has a swirling mood of chaos, openness, and vulnerability, and is visually lush and beautiful. Poitras’s films, on the other hand, have geopolitical concerns and are tightly organized and rigorous by necessity, although she is still interested in the composed shot, in shadow and landscape. While Goldin explores subjects that are personal to her, Poitras only occasionally reveals her own investments in what she puts on-screen, telling her story through other people’s lives. These two artists have produced cutting-edge work of such immense value that, despite being provocateurs challenging both government and industry, they have generally been met with appreciation from the public as well as from the fields in which they work and thrive.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed began with Goldin and PAIN, two of whose members—Alex Kwartler and Clare Carter—had spent a couple years filming its activism before deciding to find a broader audience for its work. Collaborating with a production team consisting of Howard Gertler, Yoni Golijov, and John Lyons, in addition to Goldin and Kwartler, Poitras set out to take viewers through PAIN’s campaign to force the West’s most esteemed art institutions to divest from the Sackler family. This narrative is seamlessly interwoven with a sensitive look at members of Goldin’s social circle—including activist and bar owner Maggie Smith and late, legendary downtown art figures such as David Armstrong (her lifelong and most formative friend), firebrand David Wojnarowicz, and the iconic Cookie Mueller—as well as, most importantly, Barbara, who was first committed to a mental hospital at a young age and whose life of resistance, despite ending in suicide, inspired Goldin to strive for her own freedom of sexuality and will.

In her use of form, Poitras reveals her roots as an experimental filmmaker who studied with Ernie Gehr, Abigail Child, and Peggy Ahwesh at the San Francisco Art Institute. Throughout the film, she juxtaposes an array of themes—AIDS, the 1980s avant-garde, the history of experimental film in New York—with extraordinarily skilled representations of Goldin’s oeuvre. The moments in which we see Goldin’s work are among the most beautiful in the history of cinematic renderings of still photography. Goldin and Poitras make sure we see the edges of every single photograph, while also maintaining Goldin’s signature slideshow format and never cropping or zooming in on an image. Poitras even retains the sound of slides clicking into place, an organic element in the experience of Goldin’s slideshows. Most interestingly, the director shows us the world through her collaborator’s political perspective, submitting to Goldin’s vision and thereby transforming herself (as all great artists must, and as Goldin herself does with her own subjects) into a more intimate filmmaker.

Over the course of the film, we come to understand Goldin’s values in increasingly granular detail. One of the most impressive scenes reveals both her character and her thought process by showing her testifying in front of the New York State Assembly about her experiences with buprenorphine, a substitution treatment for opioid addiction. Goldin begins with a stark statement that she would not have been able to get off opioids without the drug, then critiques the fact that doctors are required to meet certain criteria in order to prescribe it but are allowed to put patients on OxyContin without restraint—a double standard that places a deadly stigma on treatment. “Addiction,” she says, “is not a moral issue,” making clear to the committee that medically assisted treatment “is not my road to recovery; it is recovery.” Her testimony presents difficult concepts with matter-of-fact clarity and offers a theoretical framework for understanding addiction. What Goldin teaches us in this scene is that, contrary to the new-age myth that claims we must first get ourselves together in order to make a difference in society, people can be excellent artists and impactful citizens while simultaneously grappling with addiction, other health problems, and painful histories.

Both Poitras and Goldin have stood in defiance of institutions while also being highly celebrated by them. But unlike many prominent artists who have resisted in similar ways, they do not fear a reversal of fortune or a loss of attention—certainly not enough to compromise their ethics. If more celebrities spoke out in informed and combative ways against corporate and state abuse, such institutions would have to transform (the success of entertainment labor unions is a case in point). In her battle against the Sacklers, Goldin threatened to pull a retrospective of her career from the National Portrait Gallery in London, prompting that museum to become, in March 2019, the first to refuse a donation from the family. Two days after that, the Tate Modern, also in London, followed suit; the next day, so did New York’s Guggenheim. As for Poitras, with the film, she once again made a courageous decision to use her journalistic gifts to expose a grave injustice, successfully bringing the issue of the overdose crisis to a wide audience, and in the process earning a third Oscar nomination, which she shared with Goldin and the rest of the producing team. In other words, both Goldin and Poitras have proved that artists with integrity are worth more than the institutions that claim to hold them up. They have meaning on their own. Regardless of how we engage with their work, this is a lesson that we all need to learn.

In the end, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a portrait of talent, beauty, guts, and direct action. It elevates Goldin beyond her already iconic image to the level of a real mensch. It shows her applying her profound commitment to community by actively working to save lives threatened by corporate profit in a way she could not save those lost to AIDS three decades before. The film also extends Poitras’s work beyond the realm of complex international systems of surveillance and oppression into the most intimate spaces of one American woman’s life. Through this shift in scale, we learn that people in conflict can change the world—and that change can be beautiful.

Photography by Nan Goldin