Nan Goldin’s photographs and plain-spoken recollections make people matter on screen. Her contribution to All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is compelling, though the film sometimes moves on before we have finished looking.
Fi1m perspective
Nan Goldin talks over her photographs in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), and director Laura Poitras gives us time to look. These slideshows are among the documentary’s strongest passages: the pictures remain worth studying while the voice gives us more to understand. We were moved by how much the people in those photographs came to matter as she spoke. Her frankness allows that feeling to develop without the photographs becoming mere illustrations for an interview. Her producer credit sits alongside contributions of photography, slideshows and music input.
Goldin had been making sequences from still pictures long before that collaboration. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency developed through evolving slideshows accompanied by music, with a film version in 1986. In I’ll Be Your Mirror (1995), made with Edmund Coulthard, she combined photographs with Super-8 footage and interviews. These are different ways of deciding how an audience encounters the photographs: which picture follows which, how long we look, and what we hear while looking.
In Poitras’s film, editors Brian A. Kates, Joe Bini and Amy Foote handle the shifts between Goldin’s testimony, slideshows and campaign footage with care. Returning to her voice draws us back into the recollections after the urgency of the protests, without feeling like a pause for explanation. The photographs receive close attention even when there is pressing activity elsewhere. We can follow the campaign without finding that Goldin’s work has been reduced to background information about its central figure.
The crowded structure is also the film’s chief limitation. Sometimes another change of subject arrives before a recollection has had enough time, and we wanted Poitras to stay with Goldin longer. The interruptions frustrate because those recollections are already absorbing. This remains a film we recommend warmly, particularly for the space it gives Goldin to speak and the care it takes over showing her work. Start with All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, and give the photographs as much attention as the protests.
Biography
Nan Goldin is an American photographer, artist and activist. Born on 12 September 1953 in Washington, District of Columbia, she has contributed to film and television in acting, producing and directing capacities.
She appears as herself and is credited as a producer on the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), directed by Laura Poitras. Earlier credits include the role of Nan in Variety (1985) and Woman at the Bar Exhibit in the series The Deuce (2017). She directed I'll Be Your Mirror (1995).
