We write our autobiography every day and while we do it we fight against all odds with words. We turn our lives into stories that we repeat over and over again, in our heads and on the bars, but rarely do we access the real memories, unless they take you by surprise and you discover that that dark or humiliating episode is actually coming back. turn your cheeks on and you ain't damn funny It's not easy facing your own demons. The past can come alive, however briefly.
Nan Goldin didn't need that moment: she soon realized that photography could be a brutally honest mirror of herself and those around her. Today she is 69 years old and after many peaks she has tattooed the phrase "I'm sorry" on her forearm. She is one of the most influential photographers of our time. She rose to fame in the 1980s with a project, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in which she recorded her own wayward life and that of her circle of friends, addicts, hustlers, transvestites, and prostitutes. She herself worked as a go-go dancer at a nightclub and for a time was a dominatrix at a female-run club that attracted a left-wing clientele. She was abused by her partner (in a 1984 self-portrait, Nan after being beaten, stares at the camera with her soul bare and the domes of her eyes bruised), she became vehemently hooked on heroin, and when she finally managed to quit needle, she became addicted overnight to OxyContin, an opioid she had been prescribed in 2014 as a pain reliever after wrist surgery. She survived an overdose.
His battle against the Sackler dynasty, the family of billionaires whose company, Purdue Pharma, unleashed an epidemic of opioid overdose in the United States (deaths number in the hundreds of thousands), is at the origin of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), a documentary film by Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) that won the last Golden Lion in Venice. The film follows on the heels of activist Goldin taking on a corporation, the way she exposes the Sacklers' alleged philanthropy and generosity in the art world, causing one museum after another to receive donations – from the Tate to the Louvre or the Guggenheim – will face their miseries and remove their name from the walls.
Goldin ends up turning the film into a portrait of life. He traces the grim stories of his past: suffocation in a family brutalized by double standards; the suicide of her sister Barbara, who fell on the railway track when she was 18 years old; how that tragic event made her go silent and how she was able to recover her voice through the camera. We all carry burdens that others cannot see or imagine how heavy they can be. But only some know how to "get out of the darkness and run at full speed towards life."
