All The Beauty and the Bloodshed

A demonstration in the New York Metropolitan Museum in 2018 has all the look of ones that we are getting so accustomed to these days. Protesters throwing fake prescriptions, the orange pill pots into the water feature then playing dead introduces the viewer to Nan Goldin. A world-renowned photographer with a cause against big pharma, the company Purdue, who produced and aggressively marketed their painkiller OxyContin and a section of the Sackler family in particular.

It’s from here that the film takes several strands looking at Goldin’s family, her life and work, and protest. They appear to butt into each other rather than any great blending that is until things are pulled together towards the end.

Nan Goldin’s life has been scarred by tragedy, the most enduring, the treatment of her beloved sister Barbara who at a young age was deemed too much for her parents who sent her away, ostensibly for mental health reasons, eventually for her to take her own life.

We then hand-break turn into a nice middle-class New York apartment where Nan Goldin and her team plot their action against the Sacklers and their decades of profiteering from OxyContin that has been associated with rapid addiction and eventual death.

This particular element initially has a very privileged air about it; safe with the knowledge that Goldin has leverage through her work being in demand by exhibitors around the world and her refusing to exhibit it within galleries that have association or potential association with the Sacklers. That cosy revolutionary thought is gradually dispelled as the campaign develops, into a grass-roots protest movement, and the scale of the opiate crisis in the US becomes clear and how it cuts across all strata of American society.

Another strand is the legal work that finally gets money from the Sacklers though not culpability. It’s a complicated area that sees their business Purdue go bankrupt while the family remain flush.

Directed by Laura Poitras the film is not a revolutionary piece of documentary filmmaking, being fairly tradition in construct. What it is does have is great reach delving into the past, the present and looking into the future. The ambition is to get institutions to remove the Sackler name.

Goldin’s life in New York was at a time when the arts and bars were bursting with innovation as people drifted together exchanging ideas, drugs and fluids. This was also the time of HIV/AIDS which ripped through the community leaving almost no one unaffected by loss.

Goldin is disarmingly honest throughout the documentary; about her time in New York, her addiction to OxyContin, her physical and mental pain, as well as that of her friends. These very personal elements shown by Goldin’s slides hit the hardest. She is also candid about her feelings towards her parents, their shortcomings as people who probably didn’t want to but had to have children by convention.