Laura Poitras: The Beauty and the Bloodshed of Nan Goldin | FilmInk

Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a portrait of famed New York artist Nan Goldin. The film tracks Goldin’s years of activism during the AIDS crisis, and her recent fight with activist group P.A.I.N. against the infamous Sackler family, developer of OxyContin and owner of pharmaceutical empire Purdue Pharma, who have played a key role in America’s deadly opioid epidemic.

Ahead of its theatrical release, and screenings at the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC), Poitras spoke to FilmInk via zoom.

Nan Goldin is someone you fiercely respect as an artist. Did you have any doubts before taking on the documentary?

“There’s a lot of documentaries about renowned people. I wanted to make sure that I made a film that would stand on its own and not just rest upon the work of the protagonist, in this case, Nan. If you go to a film festival, there’ll be a lot of names and people that you know, that the documentary’s about. And I just have a little bit of hesitancy about that. Even though it’s not the first time that I’ve made a film about somebody well known, Julian Assange would be another example [Risk]. I was just a little bit nervous about that. And then also, Nan’s been making work about her life for a long time. I had to feel confident that I would add something, and that the film would stand on its own.”

You’ve said that you didn’t want to just make a biopic about Nan. How conscious of this were you in your approach?

“Exactly. That’s a negative word to describe it as a biopic. And so, that’s the word I’m like, ‘danger, danger’. I consider it a portrait. Nan’s also a portrait artist who makes portraits. So, it’s a particular telling of Nan’s story, very much in collaboration with Nan. But there are so many parts of her life that aren’t being covered, and that’s okay. Those weren’t the questions I was looking for. I definitely didn’t want to have the curator trying to tell the audience why it’s art or why they should care about it. I wanted Nan’s art to speak for itself.”

How collaborative was Nan?

“Totally. I’m the director, I have the final cut of the film. We got the film to a rough cut. And then she came in and had lots of notes and suggestions, about things that should go deeper. We were working on a trailer, and of course we sent it to her because it has her artwork in it, and she’d be like, ‘oh yeah, let’s change this image for that image. This image is gonna work better’. And so, she knows her archive of photographs so well, and in many cases they’re fabulous. And so, that was a very collaborative process and very additive, in terms of working together. I think that we’re both proud of what we made together and that it hopefully draws upon both of our strengths.

“She’s a producer of the film, a credited producer. She started the film before I joined. She and P.A.I.N. started filming and then it wasn’t until about a year and a half when she said she was looking for people to join. That’s how I got in. So, she’s a full producer. For instance, we’re nominated right now for an Academy Award. She’s also nominated. It’s not just me.

“P.A.I.N. was the hook. That was the thing that had similar themes to my previous films, an individual or small group of individuals taking on injustice in the US. [Members of] P.A.I.N. sitting around Nan’s living room, I think of WikiLeaks, how people who are really committed and willing to take risks can expose wrongdoing.”

Nan is an outsider, a little like Snowden, yet very different to your previous subjects. Do you think that was partly what intrigued you?

“I think the intimacy, the sort of depth, the kind of emotional range of her work, to me that was really exciting. And it was also exciting to collaborate with somebody whose work I really respected, who was also an artist. Her work is very well known in the film world too, not just in museum spaces. Directors, cinematographers often draw upon Nan’s photographs for inspiration. It was like collaborating with one of the great cinematographers, and to be able to tell a story that uses her images in a sort of narrative context, that was really exciting for me. The differences were exciting.

“Nan’s not an outsider troublemaker, but she’s an outsider. She went so far out, but then she was at some point invited in, which often happens. I’m thinking about whistle-blowers like Daniel Ellsberg, the establishment did not have their arms open for Daniel Ellsberg when he released the Pentagon Papers. But now they do, he’s considered this heroic figure. So, oftentimes it takes a little bit of time for society to catch up to these troublemaker outsiders. I keep talking about Julian because I hope that it’s on people’s mind there, fighting for his freedom, and certainly as a US citizen, I think it’s atrocious that we’re trying to extradite him.”

Why do you think you’re drawn to these people on the outskirts of society, rebels that take on these massive issues?

“I clearly am. And, particularly as ways to talk about larger critiques of society. I made a lot of films about the so-called War on Terror, horrified at the torture of people in Guantanamo Bay Prison. I find that it’s very hard to live in a country where these things are happening. And so, by making films, it’s like, ‘okay, I can find someone who also maybe shares some of those belief systems and then make a work that’s a larger critique of society, but that’s also a portrait. Through the individual, you come to understand something more universal. I’m drawn to these troublemakers, but specifically those that are tackling injustice in the context of the US empire. I also think positionality is really important. I think other films from other places are really important, but I think those are films for other people to make.”

What do you think is the relationship between Nan’s work and activism, which is so fused?

“That’s a good question. I think, she often says that she is just compelled to do things right. I think that she moved into the activism space because she understood the role that the Sacklers played, quite frankly, a criminal role in the current overdose crisis, and that they also had their names plastered all over all these museums. Once she read this article in The New Yorker by Patrick Radden Keefe, she just had to do something. I think that having to do something is what motivates her art and her activism. She just can’t sit by. So, I think that they’re aligned, and she does think that that this organisation is a continuation of her practice. But there’s also a separation; her artwork that is shown in museums is different than her protests.

“But her protests are definitely informed by her being an artist. The people who are members of P.A.I.N., they share commonalities, like direct experience with addiction, either they or a loved one, so that they care about those issues. And then they also are mostly artists, so they have a sense of how to make disruptive actions that will stop people in their tracks and cause attention. And so, she was very good at doing that. I think if they weren’t artists, they wouldn’t have had that success.”

You had comprehensive access to her archive. How much of a challenge was that in terms of choosing what to use? 

“It was like the most sensitive, precious thing that anyone’s ever shared with me. I joke that I treated it a lot like top secret documents, we had to handle everything with the utmost extreme care; this is Nan’s life’s work, that she was allowing us to borrow and craft. And so, we just had to treat it with enormous amounts of respect, and honour what was at stake for her. I would say to everyone, when you make a film, you will do anything for it. But it’s always the case, that the person in a documentary, that the person who trusts you, always has more at stake than you do, is always risking more. That needs to be really respected.”

In the film, Nan is very open in terms of everything that she’s been through. What was that process like, of walking her through that and getting her trust?

“To be honest, there were certain places where we created a lot of safety nets around the process, around certain things. I would make sure somebody else was there, we would be checking in. The fact that she’s made artwork about most of the themes that are in the film, we felt confident that we could go to certain places, which I wouldn’t have if somebody wasn’t an artist who’d explored that. But still, there are things like trust, it takes time, and some of these are the most sensitive things to talk about. It’s interesting, because sometimes we do interviews and people will ask some of the most intensely personal questions, and I’ll be like, ‘Whoa, that would be something I would probably wait about a year before maybe I would ask that question’. I think we took it slow and we created a lot of safety nets around the process, so that she had agency in the process, of which of course she did as a collaborator, and that she knew that we were also respecting how much she was putting on the line.”

You’ve spoken about the post-production process as being very involved on the film. Can you tell us what that was like?

“It always is. They’re all different. This one really had so many different layers, that we were editing for a long time. And in a way, we were both in production and post-production at the same time. We were doing interviews, we were gathering new material as we were editing, and the editing was informing how the production was going. So, it was elaborate. We had an amazing editing team. Joe Bini, Amy Foote, and others.”

What would you like audiences to come away with after watching the film?

“Oftentimes, I talk about the Sacklers and the political piece of it, but really, the heart of the film is, art as a means of expression and also art as a means of survival. I think it’s a lifeline. That’s at the heart of the film. Hopefully it condemns a kind of brutality of US society and also shows that a small group of people can actually accomplish some things.”

All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is in cinemas March 9 and is also screening at AIDC as part of an exclusive delegate event on March 5, followed by a public screening later that day.



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