‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ Review: Laura Poitras’s Film About How Nan Goldin Turned Her Art of Transgression Against the Sackler Family
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the photographer Nan Goldin tells a woeful, revealing, and in its way rather funny anecdote about how in the 1980s, when she first gathered up her photographs — casually transgressive images of her and her friends, who were often drag queens and addicts, along with shots of the assorted other people and situations she experienced as part of the hummingly squalid East Village New York subculture — and tried to shop them around to galleries and museums, they were roundly rejected, because the arbiters of taste, who were inevitably men, favored photographs that were black-and-white and composed in elegant meticulous ways.
Goldin’s photographs were in garish verité color, set in environments that were so scruffy (messy bohemian apartments, ordinary people just lolling around) that it looked, to the gallery mavens, like there was no visual organization to them, no art.
This, with 40 years’ hindsight, is telling, because what you see now is that Goldin was nothing less than a postpunk Diane Arbus, and that the deceptive “randomness” of her images pulsated with life, and was the key to their power and mystery.
In fact, she had an extraordinary eye for composition. Her photographs, which she organized into slideshows like “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” seemed caught on the fly, but they were portraits.
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