All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a 2022 film directed by Laura Poitras.
It is a documentary about the life of photographer and artist Nan Goldin. The film runs on two narrative tracks. One track follows Goldin's work for P.A.I.N., Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, an advocacy group dedicated to the victims of opioid abuse. PAIN targets the Sackler family, the billionaires behind Purdue Pharmaceutical who deliberately market highly addictive OxyContin, an opiate that caused a mass addiction crisis. PAIN seeks to hold the Sacklers accountable by any means possible, including by organizing protests at museums that accept Sackler donations and put up their names.
The second track is a relatively straightforward biography of Nan Goldin's life, starting with her childhood in a home with emotionally abusive parents and with an older sister, Barbara, who committed suicide. Golden heads to New York in the 1970s and becomes enmeshed with the city's LGBT culture, eventually achieving great fame as a photographer, and getting her pictures in some of the same museums that have wings named after the Sacklers.
Tropes:
- Anachronic Order: Scenes of Goldin's PAIN advocacy are intercut with scenes of her life. And the scenes of her life, while mostly in chronological order, themselves skip around some, with scenes of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency coming before scenes of her childhood, and the end wrapping back to her childhood and specifically her sister's suicide.
- Art Imitates Art: Instead of using The Ken Burns Effect, Poitras's film shows Goldin's photographs in the manner of a slide show, as Goldin herself did in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the work that made her famous.
- Bikini Bar: Discussed Trope, as Goldin tells of how she worked as a stripper in 1970s New Jersey because in New Jersey the women didn't have to take their tops off.
- Bittersweet Ending: The Sackler name gets taken off a bunch of museum wings and exhibits, and the Sacklers have to make a substantial payout and listen to the testimony of OxyContin victims. But as Goldin herself notes, they won't ever face criminal prosecution and they still have a whole lot of money left, which is now safe from lawsuits for forever.
- Book Ends: The first scene has PAIN making a protest about the Sackler Wing of MOMA, then soon discusses Barbara Goldin's suicide. The last part of the film circles back to this, with Goldin and PAIN triumphantly observing the removal of the Sackler name from MOMA, while Barbara's suicide is examined in greater depth.
- Contrast Montage: In-Universe with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the slide show that made Goldin's name in the art world. Photos of Goldin's parents and her old home in suburbia, each looking prim and proper and respectable, are intercut with photos of her outrageous friends in the New York LGBT community.
- Documentary: The life, career, and advocacy work of Nan Goldin.
- Inkblot Test: Seen near the end, when the camera shows some of the inkblots Barbara Goldin looked at during her time in psychiatric care.
- In Medias Res: The film hits the ground running with an opening scene showing Goldin leading a protest at the Sackler wing of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Meet Cute: Goldin relates how she met her friend David Armstrong when they were both shoplifting steaks from a grocery store.
- Narrator: Nan Goldin, narrating her own story offscreen.
- Predatory Big Pharma: One thread of the documentary is about Nan Goldin's advocacy work against the Sackler family and, specifically, their company Purdue Pharma as part of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which protests the mass addiction and thousands of deaths they believe to be linked to the Sackler empire.
- Stepford Suburbia: Discussed Trope, as Goldin refers to her childhood in the Boston suburb of Swampscott and talks about "the banality and deadening grip of suburbia." She says that their neighbors didn't know what went on in the house, but then corrects herself and says they did know because they heard the screaming.
- Stock Footage: A fair amount, including clips from old art films by Goldin's friend Vivienne Dick as well as old Purdue Pharma marketing videos, including one where a smarmy announcer assures people that OxyContin is not at all addictive.
- Talking Heads: Interviewees include Goldin's friends from the art community and her fellow volunteers with PAIN, as well as journalist Patrick Keefe who wrote a book about the Sacklers, "Empire of Pain".
- Visual Title Drop: Comes near the end, when the camera catches a report written by one of the psychiatrists who treated Barbara Goldin, and how Barbara discussed "all the beauty and the bloodshed" when she was looking at a Rorshach inkblot.
