Laura Poitras' 2022 film All The Beauty And The Bloodshed - winner of the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival and available to view on BBC iPlayer - is a curious hybrid: part portrait of photographer Nan Goldin and part documentary about the anti-opioid campaign that she founded.
"Photography was always a way to walk through fear", Goldin confesses to camera, and she has certainly had more than her fair share of trauma to navigate. Born to a couple who she suggests were not emotionally or psychologically equipped for parenthood but who followed social convention anyway, Goldin endured a dysfunctional childhood in which her older sister Barbara was her one rock. Barbara's suicide in 1965, when Goldin was just 11, was devastating and has continued to cast a long shadow on her life ever since.
The fact that Barbara was privately struggling with her own sexuality and the pressure to conform to the uptight behavioural codes of middle-class, mid-century America meant that Goldin found herself subsequently drawn towards those who spurned such codes entirely. Soon she was hanging out with lesbians and living with drag queens. The latter - who donned dresses, wigs and make-up in order to become the truest versions of themselves - were a particular fascination, and later the subject of her book The Other Side. In that pre-selfie era, it was, she suggests, "an outlier act" to treat your life and the lives of those around you as art.
Gallerists and publishers certainly thought so. Goldin persisted in the face of rejection and indifference until finally someone recognised the artistic merit of her photographs and the value in her attempts to hold a mirror up to a world of which most people were ignorant. That breakthrough came after she had lugged a crate of images to a gallery, paying the cab driver with oral sex. She would go on to dance in go-go bars in New Jersey just to be able to buy film, and for a time took on sex work to help make ends meet.
It's to Poitras' credit that Goldin is so candid on these issues, also discussing her experience of domestic abuse (she would look at self-portraits of her battered, bruised face as a reminder to stay strong and avoid going back to her abuser) and the devastation that the AIDS epidemic wreaked on the community of which she was a part. The exhibition that she curated at New York's Artists Space in 1989, Witness: Against Our Vanishing, was fuelled by anger at the misinformation, stigma and inaction that surrounded the disease, and the controversy that the show stirred up only politicised her further.
All The Beauty And The Bloodshed focuses on a different epidemic, though one that also incensed Goldin. A former opioid addict, she was appalled to realise the extent to which the Sackler family - who, as the manufacturers of OxyContin, bear significant responsibility for the opioid crisis in the US - bankrolled galleries and museums around the world. The lack of public funding for the arts has led to institutions happily hopping into bed with unsavoury types like the Sacklers, who are eager for any opportunity to indulge in a spot of artwashing.
Goldin set up the advocacy organisation PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) on the assumption that the likes of the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery might be inclined to listen to the criticisms of an artist whose work they exhibit, or have in the past. Poitras tracks PAIN's activities, from planning meetings in Goldin's flat to the protests themselves, where supporters of the organisation chant anti-Sackler slogans, scatter spoof prescription leaflets and pill bottles around and stage die-ins on museum atrium floors.
The film could perhaps have said more about the extent to which the Sacklers are to blame and about the unscrupulous marketing strategies through which OxyContin has been peddled, but the viewer is left in no doubt as to the righteousness of PAIN's cause. Spoiler alert: the documentary ends on a high, with the news that numerous galleries and museums have not only taken down the Sackler name but (more importantly) refused their money as a result of the pressure applied by Goldin and PAIN.
Unflinching and unsettling, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is a tough but essential watch - and ultimately a testament to the value of being true to yourself and determinedly fighting the good fight.
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