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.
The segments of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed that detail P.A.I.N.’s direct actions are kinetic setpieces, apprehended by Poitras’ keen eye for the shapes inside frames: orange pill bottles bob in the Louvre’s fountain pool, mock prescription slips thresh and wiggle down the conical hall of the Guggenheim, still and breathing bodies litter the Met’s Sackler.
Revered around the world, Goldin’s photographs have a deceptive simplicity, which is part of the reason they continue to inspire others to make art. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Poitras’s profoundly emotional portrait of Goldin’s life, we come to understand how the artist’s vulnerability is the foundation of her rare, almost superhuman respect for her subjects. The people Goldin shoots are outrageous, beautiful, self-destructive, creative, sexy, and sexual; they are outcasts and dropouts, some with extraordinary visions, some on the brink of tragic demise.
