As a filmmaker, Laura Poitras honed her sincerity as an investigative reporter, especially in Citizenfour , it captures the whistleblower’s history. There’s some “you there” immediacy and inside touch in her beautiful new film, but “Beauty and Bleed” brings her work to a new level aesthetic height and painful emotional depth. The film, in partnership with cinematographer Nan Goldin, documents Goldin’s radical mission to hold the Sacklers accountable for the opioid addiction crisis perpetrated by his company, Purdue Pharma. But much more than that.
This is a portrait of the artist, through her image and her words, and an intimate look at grassroots political action. It’s a documentary about families — especially two very different families, but they both have a dark tendency to shy away from the truth: Golding’s birth family, obsessed with appearances, and the Sackler family, obsessed with profit margins . In both cases, on very different levels, reputation is everything, and the resulting disruption is severe. But there are also friends’ families, misfits, and downtown deviants that Goldin celebrates in her work for more than years, those who strayed from tradition and created subcultures.
Bottom line Noble and tough knockout .
Place: VENICE FILM FESTIVAL (COMPETITION)
Director: Laura Poitras 1 hour 57 minutes
Poitras such as recording The teacher and questioner—she conducted audio interviews with Goldin over a period of nearly two years—appeared briefly and then withdrew. Several people can speak, but the film is propelled by Golding’s photos and slideshows, with her voiceovers describing key moments in her life. The events she describes are sometimes harrowing, sometimes quietly ecstatic about discovery, and always shaped by an exploratory sense of self. They got to the crux of the problem, whether she was describing her experience with OxyContin addiction, her severely dysregulated upbringing, or whether she was in “s, in Provincetown when Bohemians could afford it. In addition to Golding’s sultry, stark and provocative work, Poitt Russ also excerpted Betty Gordon and Vivienne Dick’s films to evoke the scene. Goldin appears in the latter’s Liberty’s Booty (), filmed in a brothel where she worked sex.
Golding, who once planned an AIDS-themed show, drew the ire of politicians and cultural establishments for a very honest catalogue article by her friend David Wojnarowicz , using ACT-UP protest demonstrations as a model for PAIN (Prescribing Addiction Interventions now), in 1986. Its goal: to support people battling addiction and to have Sacklers for Purdue University at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, to extreme Radical and dishonest way to promote addictive opioids.
She used her influence in Artforum called the Sacklers’ role in the health catastrophe. In some of the world’s most revered museums, Sackler’s name has long been prominently displayed on the building’s flank, Golding and her fellow activists high Shout out “The Temple of Greed! They’ve staged death. They threw prescription bottles into a reflecting pool and created a “blizzard” of prescription pages (to borrow the language of Sackler’s internal documents), raining down on the Guggenheim’s rotunda— — Acts of political influence, many of which ultimately succeed. But they are also acts of aesthetic influence, captured with a strong sense of graceful anger.
Doctors point out that before OxyContin, Purdue has been pushing Valium, Poitras, including some once-popular nightmare ads, targeting women and their anxieties, with the aim of making them feel less annoying to their husbands and families than to make them feel better. An art world philanthropist and his ill-gotten gains, Goldin emphasizes to be a problem. A vein that shapes life. At the heart of the film – or Goldin’s work – is her beloved sister Barbara, a rebellious nonconformist whose life was too full for her parents to handle. Instead, they and some of the doctors they consulted used the label of mental illness to silence their eldest son. Her story made Humans are unbearable – her pain, her horrific death, her mother’s ways of denial. Neighbors in the suburbs must be unaware of their civil unrest and its horrific depths. The art world shouldn’t consider all the cash that museum donors yearn for The source of. In The Song of Sexual Dependence , 1985 slides and 1986 books, often considered Goldin’s masterpiece, her self-portrait Brutal and scarred and bruised by her ex-boyfriend. In her introspection, in her embrace of people’s unacceptable struggles, her spirit is to reject shame.
Turning her anger into focused action, she successfully pressured multiple museums to cut ties with Sackler. Poitras captured a remarkable virtual confrontation in her usual indoor reporting role, the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy hearing Part of a meeting in which Goldin and others influenced by OxyContin confront members of the Sackler family — their testimony unfolds on a laptop screen, but still full of emotion. The Sackler may look away for a moment, but they Can’t take my eyes off. That didn’t happen.” When Lucinda Williams’ voice appears in the end credits, full of stern knocks and candid voices, after the shudder and shimmer of the Soundwalk Collective’s soundtrack is the perfect ending to the movie, emphasizing that this does happen, and there’s no need to look away. Goldin’s activism story would make for a worthy movie. So will the story of her birth and growth as an artist. Her sister’s story pulls it all into another dimension, and the way Poitras and Goldin bring those threads together, into the light, is a sublimation that might shake you to the core. This is art.
1986 Full credits 4089910
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition) 4089910Dealer: Neon
Production Company: Participant, Praxis Films Director: Laura Poitras Photography and slideshows Film: Nan Goldin
Producers: Howard Gertler, John Lyons, Nan Goldin, Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras Executive Producer: Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann, Clare Carter, Alex Kwartler, Hayley Theisen
Editors: Amy Foote, Joe Bini, Brian A. KatesMusic: Soundwalk Collective
4089910International Sales: Altitude2020 1 hour minute 1986 THR Newsletter
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