nan goldin

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

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In the opening scene of the Nan Goldin documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the legendary fine-art photographer is leading a flash-mob protest at a modern art museum, demonstrating against their acceptance of donation money from The Sackler Family.  She lays down on the museum floor, pretending to be a corpse alongside dozens of collaborators, and the camera catches glimpse of a “SILENCE = DEATH” tote bag commemorating ACT UP protests of decades past.  Later in the film, similar archival footage from the ACT UP era shows Goldin decrying Reaganite Evangelical indifference to the AIDS epidemic, platforming fellow activist artists like David Wojnarowicz to combat institutional cruelty in an art gallery setting.  Both protests are personal to Goldin, who has recently become addicted to the Sacklers’ profit-over-people product Oxycontin and has historically lost countless loved ones to the Reagan administration’s deliberate mishandling of AIDS.  Both protests earn their screentime thematically, but only one is compelling to look at, having earned a fascinating vintage texture through the technological passage of time.  The modern smartphone footage at an overlit Metropolitan Museum exhibit just can’t compete, since it’s near-indistinguishable from disposable one-glance content on a social media feed.

That textural difference between past & present footage weighs heavily on the film throughout.  All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is half a career-spanning slideshow from Nan Goldin’s legacy as a fine art photography rock star and half a document of her current mission to deflate The Sackler Family’s tires, at least in the art world.  The career-retrospective half can’t help but be more compelling than the current political activism half, since her archives are dense with the most stunning, intimate images of Authentic City Living ever captured.  Her personal history in those images and her recent struggles with addiction more than earn her the platform to be heard about whatever she wants to say here, though, especially since the evil pharmaceutical empire she’s most pissed at has trespassed on her home turf.  The protest group Goldin helps organize, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, specifically aims to have the Sackler name and donations removed from fine art museums, attacking the family’s cultural prestige since it is improbable to dismantle their personal wealth.  P.A.I.N.’s protests in the film only target museums that feature Goldin’s work in their permanent collection, leveraging her cultural clout in the art world to do as much practical damage to the Sackler name as they can.  The only problem is that documentation of these efforts only amounts to Good Politics, not Good Art, which is an unignorable fault in a film that proves it’s possible to achieve both.

Documentarian Laura Poitras was likely excited to make a movie about Nan Goldin precisely because of those modern-day P.A.I.N. protests, since amplifying Goldin’s personal war on the Sacklers fits in so snugly with her past modern-politics documentaries about WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and the NSA.  I’m grateful she took interest, no matter what her reason, since it’s the closest I’ll ever get to being in the audience for one of Goldin’s classic Ballad of Sexual Dependency slide shows.  Setting up a rack of six slide projectors like a guitarist’s Marshall stack, Goldin’s slideshows register as more of a D.I.Y. punk act than a gallery exhibit.  Here, she recalls her journey from developing her early drag bar photos at the local pharmacy to earning enough art-world clout that she can convince museums to turn down 7-figure donations from prestige-hungry, life-destroying benefactors.  I’m used to seeing Goldin’s photos in isolation, collected as single images among her No-Wave NYC contemporaries’ similarly unpretentious, self-documentary imagery.  It’s a treat to be immersed in her work at length here, learning the names & personalities of the recurring “characters” in her photos and getting a better sense of her iconoclastic presence in the larger world of fine art.  So, of course, the modern protest footage that presumably drew Poitras to the project often frustrates in its distraction from what drew me to watch it.  Goldin’s artwork is hardly a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, though; it’s just more potent, tastier medicine.

Laura Poitras is not using Nan Goldin’s life story as an excuse to score political hits against Purdue Pharma & The Sackler family.  If anything, this documentary feels like a fluid collaboration between the two artists, and Poitras is only there to give Goldin as much space as she wants to rant about how the Sacklers have turned fine art galleries into “temples of greed.”  If Goldin wanted to tell the story of her life’s work separately from the story of her recent protests, I’m sure she could’ve found an obliging collaborator to film her self-narrated slideshows.  She even could have made that movie on her own, since her control over the rhythm, scoring, and storytelling of her slideshows is in itself a kind of improvised filmmaking, a skill she’s been honing for decades.  It’s reasonable to assume that the decision to give her modern crusade against the Sacklers equal weight as her bottomless catalog of breathtaking city-life portraits was partly—if not entirely—Goldin’s own.  It’s a politically respectable choice, of course, but it’s also an artistically limiting one.

-Brandon Ledet

Variety (1983)

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The No Wave cinema movement arrived out of necessity for survival. The New York City financial slump of the late 70s & early 80s made for cheap living that encouraged a flourishing punk scene, brimming with drugged-out artsy types who had to find productive creative outlets for their pent-up energy, lest they die of drug overdoses. Early No Wave productions are dirt-cheap DIY pictures captured by snotty, over-confident punks who had no idea what they were doing with the camera but boldly did it anyway. As the city’s financial rut softened and the cinematic novices gained hands-on experience, however, the scene grew up and effectively disappeared. Those who continued to make movies graduated from No Wave DIY experiments to legitimate productions: Jim Jarmusch went from Permanent Vacation to Down by Law; Susan Seidelman went from Smithereens to Desperately Seeking Susan; Lizzie Borden went from Born in Flames to the Showtime equivalent of Skinemax. Bette Gordon’s 1983 erotic drama Variety arrived midway into that transition. It’s slightly more polished than the grimy, rough-around-the-edges punk provocations of early No Wave. It’s also a far cry from a properly funded Hollywood picture, still feeling like a haphazard predecessor to the soon-to-tome indie cinema boom defined by names like Tarantino, Soderbergh, and (surprise!) Jarmusch. Variety is a post-No Wave, pre-Indie 90s microbudget art project, a cultural landmark with no clear contextual home. That same caught-between-two-worlds unease is also reflective of its protagonist’s mental state and the state of the city she lives in.

Variety stars Sandy McLeod as a sexually timid woman who, in a moment of financial desperation, lands a job working the ticket booth at a NYC porno theater. Everyone around her seems confused about her decision to take the job. Friends are curious about her stories concerning the daily tasks & customer base at the theater but are also visibly uncomfortable with her growing interest in pornography. Her patrons & coworkers leer at her through the booth. They reach for what little flesh they can touch through the money hole as she hustles $2 tickets for pictures with titles like Beyond Shame, Purely Physical, and Nothing to Hide. Even she seems unsure what she’s doing there, nervously pacing in the theater’s lobby on her smoke breaks while obscene porno sounds blare in the background, until finally she works up the nerve to peek at the projections inside. She initially intends to keep herself separate from the prurient films beyond the booth, treating her job as if it were no different from any other service industry gig. That compartmentalization proves to be impossible as she becomes increasingly fascinated with both the pornography and its audience. In particular, she becomes fixated on a sharply dressed mobster who frequents her theater, compulsively tailing him around the city in a conspicuous way that puts her in danger. There isn’t much of a narrative drive to Variety beyond its initial premise of a grimy porno theater seducing a “normal” young woman outside the safety of her social circle (and socially enforced sexual repression). She leaves that social familiarity to experience a grimy era of NYC at the tail end of its porno boom, a strange time when it felt like porn might eventually go legit and appeal to a wide, mainstream audience.

As an isolated document of a grimy 80s NYC, Variety isn’t exactly invaluable. The film does go out of its way to document street-side ads for pornos and the internal spaces of dirty magazine shops & arcades. However, that’s work that’s been much more thoroughly executed by more recent, academic outlets like The Rialto Report. Variety’s post-No Wave depiction of a young woman being lured into the fringes of sex work is also outshone by the similar territory covered in Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls. The difference there is that Working Girls is much less delicate about depicting the implied sex of its setting, whereas Variety only includes light softcore imagery in its porno theater projections. That timidity is also reflective of Variety’s engagement with its feminist themes, which mostly simmer in the background while the main narrative concerns itself with an inner-psyche character study. The strongest Variety’s feminist philosophy & pornographic mind comes through is in a couple scenes where the protagonist slips into long, unbroken erotic-fiction monologues recounting the “plots” of the films her theater is screening. Meanwhile, her friends uncomfortably ignore her newfound interest, frustratedly busying themselves with pinball & Chinese food as if they can’t hear her. There’s also a fantastic break with reality where she mentally projects her own internal fantasies onto the porno theater’s silver screen, imaginatively transforming herself into a vamp worthy of the dirty magazines she’s started reading. Variety is less a document of a long-gone grimy NYC than it is a character study set in that porno-soaked playground, tracking how the sex work subculture that bloomed in its era spilled over into the psyches & behavior of mainstream women curious about, but cautious of the pleasure to be found within.

While Variety might not be a one of a kind, invaluable depiction of NYC, it is an invaluable snapshot of late-No Wave filmmaking’s transformation & dissipation. Photographer Nan Goldin’s presence in the film as a side-character bartender (among other pleasant-surprise presences Luis Guzman & Cookie Mueller) is particularly illustrative of the film’s late-No Wave textures. The photographs Goldin took on-set are stunningly gorgeous, but the actual quality of the film proper has the faded, warm hues of a vintage dirty Polaroid. It doesn’t quite look as amateur as the deliberately shoddy outsider art of No Wave’s humble beginnings, but Nan Goldin’s photographs are still demonstrative of how different the film looks from a properly funded, formalistically crafted production. Variety is a No Wave film in transition about a woman in transition as a sexual being thanks to NYC’s own sexual culture-transition that would soon be snuffed out by Mayor Giuliani in the 90s. That prevents it from being an extreme example of its time or movement, but it does afford the film a very peculiar, ethereal quality of its own all the same.

-Brandon Ledet