The wrong things kept secret

The documentary film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) by Laura Poitras (b.1964) begins and ends in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, around the Temple of Dendur (completed by 10 BC). The temple is housed in a 1978 extension to the museum, which was previously named the Sackler Wing after the family donated a substantial portion of the funds for its construction. At the start of the film, members of the protest group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN), which was founded by the photographer Nan Goldin (b.1953) in 2017, throw prescription bottles affixed with political messages FIG.1 into the large pool of water that surrounds the temple FIG.2 and unravel banners declaiming the Sackler family’s complicity in the opioid crisis. Protesting Purdue Pharma’s production of the highly addictive drug OxyContin, they chant ‘temple of money’, ‘temple of death’ and stage a die-in FIG.3. At the end of the film, the temple becomes a site of catharsis as members of PAIN celebrate the Met’s decision to remove the Sackler name from its exhibition halls in 2021. These passages bookend and mark the overarching narrative of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. They represent injustice, activism and resolution, albeit unevenly: all that appears to change between these two moments is the erasure of a sign. By the end of Poitras’s film, the gilt letters spelling out the Sackler name above the entrance to the wing, so visible during the protests staged in 2018, have been removed. Evidence of their presence is now only visible in a ghostly smeared watermark.

During the last sequence of the film, Goldin remarks on the success of PAIN’s activism. The Musée du Louvre, Paris, was the first to capitulate and remove the Sackler name in 2019 FIG.4, followed by the Met; Tate, London; and eventually, most art, cultural and educational institutions that previously bore their name. It was the most coordinated response to the family’s role in the opioid crisis, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and exploited human pain for profit. The name removal and commitments to no longer accept money from the Sackler family – led by the National Portrait Gallery, London, when Goldin refused to stage a retrospective there if they proceeded with a proposed donation – was a refusal to be complicit in the crisis. However, Goldin is clear: this is not justice, nor is it an adequate record of the family’s culpability or an apt punishment. The Sackler family faced no criminal charges. Instead, they agreed to redistribute up to $6 billion of their wealth and claimed bankruptcy to frustrate the civil lawsuits against Purdue Pharma. Poitras includes a title slide that notes the estimated financial cost of the crisis was $1 trillion. As such, the film recalls the structure of a fable: activist success is not always the defeat of the powerful. This is a more complex story in which democratic systems of accountability reach their limits, and those fighting for a better world have to admit that they want to see their corporate monsters jailed. That is, as long as prisons exist; if the incarceration system is abolished, Goldin suggests in an early scene, the Sacklers should be the last to leave.

The residue of the Sackler name on the glass at the Met is emblematic of activist success in a world where exposure counts for everything. However, the language of signs in the film complicates the David and Goliath narrative. The gilt letters, plaques and stone engravings of the Sackler name are mirrored by the elegant fascia of Marian Goodman Gallery, London, one of Goldin’s commercial representatives at the time, as well as the bronze plaque that commemorates the donation of a drug testing machine to the Urban Survivors Union by Marian Goodman and PAIN. This activism both joins and subverts the language of authority. It is also there in the protests – in pill bottles and prescription scripts thrown from the rotunda at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York FIG.5 – underscoring Purdue’s boldface commitment to deregulation and the ubiquity of opioids.

The opioid crisis is only one part of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which is also a portrait of Goldin, who experienced OxyContin addiction and is in recovery. The film is threaded with photographs, footage and experiences from Goldin’s life FIG.6, which the artist details in voiceover. Each of the seven chapters begin with a series of photographs or archival footage of Goldin’s life, before transitioning to footage of her recent protests with PAIN. This is a film about different kinds of dependency, comprising passages from many of Goldin’s works, primarily her photographic slideshows, which began with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022). The voices that come together in PAIN protest chants find a visual correlation in Goldin’s photographs – for example, the images in The Other Side (1992–2021), which depict the world of ‘taffeta and quaaludes’ of the drag queens and trans women who she lived with, alongside her friend and fellow photographer David Armstrong (1954–2014); photographs of summers in Provincetown that led her to a lesbian separatist community of ‘flannel and tea’; and portraits of her friends and community in her flat in the Bowery in New York FIG.7. But, despite its subject, it is a biopic that rails against individuation.

Goldin’s intimate retelling of her life is prompted by Poitras’s careful off-camera questioning, which is subtly alluded to throughout. Goldin’s experience of stripping, dancing and sex work – something that she discusses here for the first time – is juxtaposed with photographs of the film-makers Vivienne Dick (b.1950) and Bette Gordon (b.1950) and their milieu, and the sanctuary of Tin Pan Alley, a bar in Hell’s Kitchen where Goldin worked, one of a cohort of women who the owner Maggie Smith employed as an alternative or additive to sex work. The horror of the HIV crisis meets the beauty of the community who struggled against government neglect and the grief of immense loss. Footage of Goldin’s exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space, New York, in 1989–90 examines the death of the actor and writer Cookie Mueller (1949–89) ahead of the opening, and the fallout surrounding the attempted censorship of the catalogue text, ‘Postcards from America: X-rays from Hell’, by David Wojnarowicz (1954–92). These events, seen from Goldin’s Downtown New York femme, post-rehab perspective, are given a new context here. This is followed by Goldin’s account of when her partner Brian beat her, burned her diaries and destroyed her belongings; the ‘greatest luck’ of her life, she says, is that she left The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at the loft where she had shown it, ‘because he would have destroyed it’. The beauty of The Ballad, and of the images of their relationship that permeate this masterpiece on desire and reliance, ricochet against the extensive bruises Goldin recorded in a series of self-portraits after the beating that buttressed her resolve not to return.

It is in such places that the film’s ‘beauty’ resides – not in the elegant galleries of the world’s major museums, but rather in the Portuguese hot dog stand, the pin badges Goldin made with her button machine and the rotting lofts in the Bowery. The beauty is Mueller in an impossible array of outfits, which progress from shift dresses in the style of Sophia Loren to space-age red body suits, with armfuls of bangles and her characteristic full-lidded eye make-up; it is Goldin and Dick posing with one another in Gordon’s films. More than anything, it is found in the generous sections drawn from Goldin’s extended body of work, populated by figures in the beginning, and later so empty and saturated by landscape or even light alone.

The other source of beauty is Goldin’s sister, Barbara, whose words provided the title of the film. These are taken from a hospital report during one of Barbara’s periods living in mental health care, imposed by her parents. The statement – ‘the future and all the beauty and the bloodshed’ – which allows Barbara to speak in perpetuity, was recorded in terms markedly alien to the language of a medical report. Barbara died by suicide in 1965, at the age of eighteen. Goldin’s bereavement was compounded by a difficult family environment and her own removal from home at the age of fourteen. In this film, as in Goldin’s work Sisters, Saints and Sibyls FIG.8, Barbara appears against the grain of her history of institutionalisation, a process, Goldin says, which served to destroy her credibility. Goldin’s narration of her sister’s life is accompanied by photographs from family albums FIG.9 – diligently labelled in ballpoint pen with initials and ages – taken by others before Goldin had her first camera. In these scenes of familial joviality, Barbara appears to escape the darker aspects of her existence. Although at the beginning of the film, Goldin remarks on the difference between the stories that can be gleaned from photographs and real memories – it is, she says, the memories that trouble her now – here Barbara’s smiles seem to glitch the story of disturbance her parents imposed upon her.

The tragedy of the two sisters comes into relief in a passage towards the end of the film, which is taken from an unfinished documentary. Goldin, behind the camera, records her parents talking about Barbara’s death, which they originally tried to describe as an accident. At the time of her death, Goldin’s mother says, Barbara was carrying a pocketbook with a quotation from The Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad. She retrieves the card, typewritten with a quotation, revealing a startling intentionality. It reads:

Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope for is some knowledge of yourself that comes too late – a crop of unextinguishable regrets.

It is a sorry way to look at life, and a stark counterpoint to Goldin’s existence. Goldin’s life, as recorded by Poitras and through her own lens, is much more than futility and regrets. Her photographs, capable of evoking exhilaration and desperation, by a degree, obliterate any normative moral measure. They are powerful in their challenge to the ethics of representation, the potentiality of witnessing and the possibility of the incidental. These are images that document moments in particular lives, but they have also served as a matrix of self-realisation for many others who might not recognise themselves otherwise.

Barbara’s prophecy of a future wrought by ‘all the beauty and the bloodshed’ plays out in the film through Goldin’s intensely raw telling of her own life story. This is a painful and a beautiful film about a recent political crisis, about an artist, downtown New York, queer America and several art-historical episodes. However, it is also about the complex entanglement of these things. The first chapter of the film, ‘Merciless Logic’ – the title taken from Barbara’s pocketbook quotation – explores the vectors of the opioid crisis and PAIN activism, but it also offers a general descriptor for that which systematises and weaponises normativity. It might refer to homophobia, to the misplaced moralism of the culture wars, to the pathologising of mental health conditions, the criminalisation of addiction or the malignment of women artists. But All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a lesson in perceiving these merciless logics and finding all the moments of beauty, and resistance and joy that escape them, if not unscathed.