Venice 2022: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Participant

As All the Beauty and the Bloodshed turns away from documenting challenges facing the fallout of Oxycontin addiction and the companies profiting from it, documentarian Laura Poitras is lucky to have such an interesting core to her work underneath. Photographer and artist Nan Goldin leads the charge not just against big firms that have wrecked and ruined hundreds of thousands of lives, but against her own past. Goldin soon becomes the focus of the documentary. Whether that is intentional or not is a question only Poitras can answer, and she appears to struggle with blurring that line between interest in an individual and their modern-day activism. 

In attempting to understand one, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed has no choice but to engage with the other. The two are intertwined, but there is a difference between examining the intertwined and revealing very little about the modern work. A quick collection of thoughtful musings and events that take place in the build-up of activism and the reason for it feels glossed over in favour of documenting Goldin’s obvious talent for photography. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed markets itself on being a touching discussion on the AIDs crisis of the 1980s and the fallout that is still felt to this day, but spends more time talking shop than talking change. 

That change is crucial and at least documented with sincerity in Poitras’ often intimate moments. Building well toward the distressing facts of the Oxycontin crisis and the 400,000 tragically killed by it, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed cowers behind its emotional angle, occasionally popping out to deal a heavy blow to the narrative. Hearing the individual struggles of so many families is a brutal comparison to what the audience here and see. The life of Goldin is used as an example to underline the points sparingly made by her activism decades later. Despite it not being of great focus aside from strong imagery at the start and end of the documentary, a bookending of her impact on the modern day is good enough for Poitras, who sandwiches a life told well in-between the contemporary moves made to bring down the Sackler family name and their hand in art galleries across the globe.  

What appears to be a uniquely American issue and the struggle against Big Pharma is documented shyly, with the main focus being the individual challenges and activism of a great artist. Poitras flickers between the rumbling woes of the 1980s and the scattered activism of the now. Her documentary draws great points but does so under false pretences. This is not a documentary of how the fight against Purdue Pharma and their disgusting actions, but one on the individual at the core of that fight. How the soul is cracked and beaten in a fight for justice that sprouted from the greed of big companies. It is sadly no surprise that the few rich out there would use the lives of others for their own gain – but that is the gambit All the Beauty and the Bloodshed makes unflinchingly clear.