Toronto International Film Festival 2022: ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED

I’m often skeptical of the idea that art can change the world and I definitely don’t think it can be considered a serious or dependable way to change policy. But what it can do is affect people on an individual basis. This isn’t a romantic notion, understandably because people want huge sweeping changes and they want them now. They want their lives to mean something in the moment rather than retrospectively or in increments to be reflected on. As the central focus of Laura Poitras’s much-deserved Venice Golden Lion winner All The Beauty and the Bloodshed, Nan Goldin’s photography is as good a time machine to those exact kinds of moments as anything else and reveals the power of them but also the melancholy of their passing as relics. Her pictures evoked not only the provocative energy of the time and space she lived in but also the grit, love, hatred, and uncertainty of it.

Seeing Yourself

Goldin mentions how it’s hard to consider today that her photographs are radical in an era where depicting one’s life through photos is the complete norm. But back then, photography, at least professionally, was “all verticle black and white pictures”. What became radical was the way that Nan Goldin was unfiltered about the sexuality and violence that existed in and around her photography.

Her most famous collection, titled The Ballad of Sexual Dependancy (1985) was photos of women, women with men, and then men the way these photos were depicted and the music that played during their shows always changed but the theme remained focused on the ways that men and masculinity enacted its power on women, especially in the realms of sex and relationships.  Goldin’s work made the people in her photographs be seen by an audience as characters but the subjects see themselves as themselves.

Subjects as Artists of their Own Film

Poitras creates a compelling portrayal of a woman who finds liberation in many forms and uses art and culture for noble ends. Her endeavors are personal and they stretch back to childhood and the death of her sister Barbara. It’s in the medical notes that reveal where the title of the film came from. They suggest that Barbara’s rebellious attitude, the “mental state” that her parents thought was a form of illness was actually insight… an ability to see all the beauty and the bloodshed of the world. Nan saw the same. Poitras is the documentarian and the director of the film, but Nan is just as much a creative arsenal for this film. Great documentarians often let their subjects be the artist in their own film like Werner Herzog did with Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man.

Poitras’s documentary shifts between Goldin’s life as a pioneering visual artist in New York with her work post-opioid crisis as an activist railing against the Sackler family’s influence on causing the drug epidemic while paving over it with philanthropic contributions to museums. What is interesting is the way that these two forces, Goldin and the Sacklers, were both involved in the art world but achieved and influenced completely different ends of it.

Conclusion:

It makes All the Beauty and the Bloodshed vibrant and incisive as a portrayal of art’s power in both directions. I can be cynical all I want to about art not solving any real problems directly, but if Goldin’s photographs have created a moment in time, a culture unto itself with a group of friends and a community – predominantly involving gay, lesbian, trans, and Black activists – then it had an impact in the real world. Like her fight against the Sacklers, it changed something, even if it couldn’t change everything.

Have you seen All the Beauty and the Bloodshed? What did you think? Let us know in the comments below!

Watch All the Beauty and the Bloodshed