The feted on-fiction flimmakers picks a part the intricacies of fashioning a portrait of a subject as formidable and complex as photographer Nan Goldin.
Watching films all-day, every day at a film festival can mean they all blur into a carousel of images until – suddenly – one cuts through and you’re in a daze outside afterwards searching colleagues’ eyes for signs they are equally moved. So it was with All The Beauty and the Bloodshed, a portrait of the artist Nan Goldin by the documentarian Laura Poitras, which did move my colleagues, yes, and also Julianne Moore’s jury which awarded it the 2022 Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion.
Poitras is no slouch when it comes to securing industry plaudits for her work, as she has under her belt an Academy Award for Best Documentary for 2015’s investigative nerve-jangler, Citizenfour. It’s a film about America’s most wanted whistleblower, Edward Snowden, which combines the tension of a fictional spy thriller with an intimacy born of the Hong Kong hotel-room setting where she, Snowden and the journalist, Glenn Greenwald, worked to get his story out while under siege from US intelligence agencies. Poitras had been put on a terrorist watchlist after her 2005 film My Country, My Country about the first Iraqi elections under US occupation, and embedding with Snowden only intensified the surveillance that is now part of her life.
To be an enemy of the state can mark one as a friend to artists. At a breakfast arranged by the German artist, Hito Steyerl, Poitras met Goldin and the latter told the former about the work of PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now).
