All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022).
Long before Nan Goldin became a world-renowned photographer, she dreamed of making films. As a teenager growing up in 1960s Massachusetts, Goldin would go to the cinema almost every day to soak up double features. By the end of her teens she was an insatiable cinephile, fluent in the European arthouse—she loved Bertolucci, Bergman, and Fellini—intrigued by the US underground—Warhol, Waters, Jack Smith—and enchanted by classic Hollywood. Fittingly, it was Antonioni’s Blow-Up that first inspired her to pick up a camera, but although Goldin fell into photography she never shook her first love.
Perhaps it is this deep-rooted cinephilia that critics sense when they describe Goldin’s photographs as “cinematic.” Goldin has dedicated her career to documenting her life, as well as the lives of her friends and chosen family. Her “subjects,” many of whom are as charismatic, stylish, and memorable as movie stars, become characters, their unfolding lives transformed into storylines which unfurl across hundreds of diaristic, richly detailed photographs. In series such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-6), Goldin follows her characters across the years, constructing in the process a sweeping portrait of a time, place, and community, from the explosive creativity of New York’s queer art scene to the devastation of the AIDS crisis. Goldin’s key themes—sex, relationships, addiction, death—are grand and, yes, cinematic; the stuff of real life and, therefore, also the stuff of movies.
With All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, that epic life and transcendent art has become, at last, literally a work of cinema. Laura Poitras, a filmmaker best known for investigative documentaries such as Citizenfour (2014), was initially drawn to Goldin’s activism rather than her art. Over several years, Poitras followed the artist as she campaigned against the Sacklers, the pharmaceutical dynasty and prominent philanthropists who have made billions off the back of the opioid epidemic. Goldin’s mission to hold the Sacklers accountable—and to strip their names from galleries around the world which have accepted donations from the family—gives the film its thrilling narrative momentum.
Goldin had already begun documenting her own activist work before Poitras’s involvement, but with a world-renowned filmmaker on board, what had originally been conceived as a topical story expanded into a broader meditation on resistance, survival, and creativity, viewed through the prism of the artist’s biography. Poitras combines present-day fly-on-the-wall footage with candid interviews with Goldin, who narrates her own story alongside clips sourced from her family archive and many filmmaking friends. Drawing heavily throughout on Goldin’s various autobiographical photo series, All The Beauty charts the trajectory of the artist’s life from the young woman photographing her drag queen roommates in Boston, to her immersion in New York’s Lower East Side art scene, where she found a home amongst a who’s-who of alternative cinema legends, including John Waters, Cookie Mueller, Jim Jarmusch, Vivienne Dick, and Bette Gordon. Poitras forges particularly powerful connections between Goldin’s political awakening during the early days of the AIDS epidemic and her later campaigning against the Sacklers, revealing how the artist has turned resistance into another form of art-making, masterminding visually spectacular acts of civil disobedience which could just as soon be happenings as protests. The result is a film which is as multilayered as a Goldin photograph; at once a biopic, an art film, an observational documentary, and a conspiracy thriller.
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Nan Goldin, 1981-6).
Goldin made her name with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a series of almost 700 photographs which depict scenes from the lives of her friends as they party, take drugs, have sex, and fall in and out of relationships. The decision to present the work as a slideshow was prompted by necessity—in 1981 when Goldin began to project, she had no access to a darkroom or money to produce prints—but it soon became clear that this dynamic format was perfectly suited to her evolving artistic ethos. She began to show the work in DIY spaces, presenting the images to a soundtrack of songs by Maria Callas, Nina Simone, and the Velvet Underground. The combination of music and churning photographs, plus that pungent title, taken from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, combined to create more than just a mood or a sense of style; the show built an entire atmospheric world populated by recurring characters and narrative arcs.
Part of what made The Ballad feel so refreshing was the way that Goldin drew on cinematic techniques in her photography, using carefully arranged sequences of images to invite the viewer to form narratives over time. In All The Beauty, Poitras highlights the filmic quality of Goldin’s work, dedicating long sections of the film to processions of images, set against music and voiceover, which are delivered in the style of the artist’s famous slideshows. At the same time, Poitras also lingers on single images, and in doing so draws out the inherently filmic quality of Goldin’s individual compositions.
An image such as Nan and Brian in Bed (1983) epitomizes Goldin’s ability to convert real life into striking scenes. In this photograph, we see the artist lying face down on a bed, watching her lover, who sits naked in the foreground, facing away from both us and Goldin, bathed in the dying light of a setting sun. Brian and Nan are both recurring subjects in The Ballad, but even without those other images we instinctively know that we are looking at the dying days of an intense affair. Unlike her peer Cindy Sherman, another photographer whose work is often described as cinematic, Goldin’s images are not filmic in the sense that they draw upon movie-land fantasies, on Hollywood mythmaking and heightened style. At her best, Goldin shows us beauty wrought from reality, translating the raw grit and glamour of everyday life into emotionally immediate images which, like a paused frame in a film reel, feel like they could leap back to life at any moment.
Exhibitions of The Ballad were treated more like screenings than gallery openings. A poster included in All The Beauty shows the slideshow listed on a bill alongside John Waters’s Desperate Living (1977). That some of these early events were presented by the Collective for Living Cinema, an artist co-op who advocated for filmmakers such as Ken Burns, Yvonne Rainer, and Dziga Vertov, demonstrate how seriously The Ballad was already being read as a work of experimental cinema. Early showings were primarily attended by the subjects of the photographs, whom Goldin treated as a test audience; she would rotate images out of the selection according to their reactions. Just like the editor of a film, Goldin would tweak the order and the soundtrack to steer the story.
Around this period, Goldin recalls Jim Jarmusch introducing her to Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), an experimental sci-fi short which consists almost entirely of still images. The parallels between Marker and Goldin, both artists playing at the border between photography and film, are clear. Marker’s film was part of a boundary-blurring, international avant-garde movement which had also influenced the scene in 1960s New York, finding expression through happenings, performances, and the interdisciplinary experiments of artists such as Barbara Rubin and Ken Jacobs. Goldin’s slideshows carried this avant-garde tradition into a new era, combining this fluidity between disciplines with the raw vérité aesthetic and evolving sexual politics of No Wave.
Liberty's Booty (Vivienne Dick, 1980).
One of the most recognizable of The Ballad’s many shuffling images is Vivienne in the green dress, NYC (1980). In this arresting portrait, a starkly lit woman decked out in emerald taffeta, red lipstick, and an angular haircut stands looking directly down the lens. The subject of this quintessential Goldin image is Vivienne Dick, an Irish filmmaker who moved to New York in 1977 and became a key chronicler of the No Wave scene. Dick met Goldin at an expat dinner party soon after arriving in the city, and they soon became close friends and mutual inspirations.
Goldin and Dick shared much common ground artistically and personally, both working in their own way to capture the unique atmosphere of the Lower East Side and often riffing on similar ideas around gender politics, female solidarity, and sexuality. Dick’s Super 8 films feel like sister works to Goldin’s photographs, charting the downtown scene from a distinctly feminist and queer perspective. Some of the most intimate images of Bowery-era Goldin in All the Beauty come courtesy of Dick. In raw footage from Beauty Becomes Beast (1979), we see Goldin dressed in an intricate leather bustier, dancing with a besuited butch, swirling her tassels exuberantly. The two women have often described themselves as each other's muses. Dick has been photographed by Goldin hundreds of times, and she is credited by the artist as having been the first to suggest that she consider using music in The Ballad. In Liberty’s Booty (1980), Dick drew directly on Goldin’s life, drawing on her friend’s experience as a sex worker to make a film exploring the dynamics between men, women, sex and commerce. Goldin appears in Liberty’s Booty in a series of vérité style scenes in which she plays a madam, a character directly inspired by a woman she encountered while working briefly in a Times Square brothel. “She was a monster,” Goldin remembers in Poitras’s film. “She would have us on our backs all day then she would come home from Bloomingdale’s showing off her lingerie.”
A few years later, Goldin would be involved in another film that aimed to depict sex workers with nuance and empathy. While Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986) is very different from Liberty’s Booty stylistically—Dick’s work experiments with form and has a raw DIY finish, while Borden’s is glossier and more conventionally structured—both films offer refreshing critiques of gender and capitalism, drawing on firsthand testimony to realistically capture life in a New York brothel. Working Girls takes place almost entirely within a brothel over the course of a long day and night, deglamorizing and demystifying the work by capturing its grind and monotony, while also re-personalizing the workers themselves, portraying them as individuals with distinctive personalities and lives beyond their jobs.
Like Goldin, Borden positions the viewer as an insider rather than a voyeur, inviting us in rather than leaving us to gawk through the window. This subjectivity is shaped by personal connections to the people and the material; both Liberty’s Booty and Working Girls were conceived in collaboration with sex workers who the filmmakers knew through their overlapping circles in the Lower East Side. It’s not coincidental then that both films feature a brilliantly grotesque madam who flaunts her luxury purchases to the girls and who seems to have been inspired by Goldin’s personal experience. Goldin’s photographs even appear in Working Girls, presented as the work of the protagonist, fellow queer artist Molly, who is working at the brothel in order to subsidize her art.
Variety (Bette Gordon, 1983).
Goldin’s own route out of sex work came via a job at Tin Pan Alley, a much-loved dive bar whose owner, Maggie Smith, made a point of hiring sex workers on principle. In Poitras’s film, wonderful archival footage captures the bar in its prime, “a polyglot place” as Smith remembers, where outsiders, weirdos and artists would mix with Reuters journalists and IRS workers, who, once drunk, “were as hard to handle as the bikers.” The bar became a key location for Bette Gordon's Variety (1983), a slippery psychological thriller about an aspiring writer who gets a job selling tickets at a Times Square porno theatre and becomes obsessed with one of the patrons.
Gordon was another filmmaker closely affiliated with the Bowery; that famous image of Vivienne’s green dress was taken on the set of one of Gordon’s shorts, Empty Suitcases (1980). Goldin has a supporting role in Variety as Nan, an aspiring photographer who works at a dive bar and worries about becoming a “fifty-year-old barmaid.” In scenes shot in Tin Pan Alley, she stands behind the bar observing as her almost exclusively female patrons—which include Goldin’s real-life friends Cookie Mueller and Suzanne Fletcher, as well as the countercultural writer Kathy Acker (who co-wrote Variety’s screenplay)—discuss their relationships, their sexuality, and their work. These sequences feel fresh and engaging, like eavesdropping on real conversations between friends. In this sense, Variety serves the same function as Goldin’s photographs, capturing the unique atmosphere of a particular, now lost, moment in time, and the vivid characters who inhabited that moment. Many sequences in Gordon’s film look like scenes from The Ballad brought to life, and Goldin seems to have felt this way, too. Her photo series Variety transforms this Tin Pan Alley set from the film back into stills, teasing once again the border between fantasy and reality, between Goldin’s real life and the art that came from it.
Variety’s vision of seedy pre-gentrification Manhattan—seductive, dangerous, all cramped pink-lit rooms and neon-striped streets—clearly exists in the same continuum as Dick’s films and Goldin’s photographs.The film is sometimes described as a feminist riff on Vertigo, and like Hitchcock, Gordon is preoccupied with the power dynamics of looking, although she provocatively complicates the picture by introducing the possibility of a liberating, sexually subversive female gaze. Goldin’s work also often raises questions of power, although she has fiercely challenged the idea that the photographer inevitably exploits their subjects. “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party,” wrote Goldin in the 1986 publication of The Ballad.1 “But I'm not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.”
Part of what has differentiated Goldin’s approach over the decades is her commitment to collaborating with her subjects, her desire to shoot from the inside rather than the outside. In All The Beauty and the Bloodshed, Poitras emulated this ethos, inviting Goldin to work with her on the film as a co-author rather than a subject. Just as Goldin shaped The Ballad based on the demands of her friends and subjects, so too did Poitras bring the artist into her edit suite to review footage and shape the final cut. In this sense, Goldin is perhaps finally becoming the filmmaker she once dreamed of being back when she used to sit in those double features as a suburban teenager. Now, all these decades later, Goldin has turned her life into cinema. The result is something as real as film can be: life rendered as art, in all its beauty and its bloodshed.
WORKS CITED
1. Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (New York, Aperture, 1986), p. 6.