We Will Never Be Silent Again: Nan Goldin and the Politics of Speaking up
Even Nan Goldin’s photographs are not silent. The images were meant to be shown with music blaring in the background and audience members cheering and jeering at the screen. Playwright Darryl Pinckney says of Goldin’s first public display “it was extremely raucous. What I remember most is the noise, not just of the music or the equipment, but of people talking to the screen.”
The photographer herself is no stranger to using her voice. During the AIDS epidemic, she championed the queer community and highlighted the work of gay artists. When the National Endowment for Arts took away a grant for an exhibit she curated on AIDS, she fought back. And most recently, she staged protests and raised funds to remove the name of the Sacklers (billionaire art collectors cum opioid crisis orchestrators) from the halls of major art museums–a struggle which Laura Poitras’ documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, charts.
Perhaps, then, it comes as a surprise when Goldin tells us, toward the beginning of the film, that “I was shy beyond social phobia. Like crippling shyness. There were, like, six months where I didn’t speak at all.” This statement provides a foundation for Nan’s arc and a central theme for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed–the threat of silence and the struggle to overcome it.
The documentary begins with Nan’s activism with Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN), a group she founded while recovering from opioid addiction. In the opening scene, Goldin and her fellow activists march into the MET Museum, armed with replica pill bottles. At someone’s signal, the group starts throwing bottles and chanting, a loud and showy display in the museum’s usually-reserved halls. Their aim? To convince the museum to remove the Sackler name from its galleries, a small act of justice to the countless Americans who have suffered under the opioid crisis.
After introducing us to PAIN and its aims, Poitras shifts gears, focusing on Goldin’s childhood and family life. While the first part of the film follows pretty standard documentary conventions, with footage following Goldin around and talking head interviews, the next part is a bit more stylistic. The backdrop of Goldin’s past are her photographs, often accompanied by music or a voiceover. In her weathered, husky voice, Goldin explores the “beauty and bloodshed” of her life: her bond with her deceased sister, her involvement with New York queer and artistic communities, her emergence as a photographer, and her championing of LGBT artists during the AIDS epidemic. Poitras continues to take us back and forth in time, moving between the contemporary and the archival, between the stylistic and the straightforward.
In many films, the seesawing in both narrative and style would be a detriment, a decision that makes the film choppy and interrupts narrative flow. Luckily, Poitras gives us enough thematic similarities between the two halves to make the film work. Art and activism are obvious connections. In her art, the film tells us, Goldin is always attuned to the political, incorporating ideas on intimacy and queerness into her photographs. In her activism, Goldin is always attuned to the artistic, using her skills to create props for protests. What seemed to me to be just as prevalent, however, was the common threat identified in both parts of the film–silence.
To Goldin, silence is not so much a choice as it is something a person is forced to submit to. Silence is the effect of a mother’s harsh demands on her children. Silence is the threat of parents who want to stop the publication of Goldin’s first photography book, afraid of their daughter’s statements about their cruel treatment. Silence is something the “church and government” want to do to gay sex and love in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. And silence is something worth resisting.
Thus, the documentary is at its best when it focuses on the loud, the direct, and the confrontational. Its most memorable scenes include seas of ACT UP protestors chanting “We will never be silent again,” Goldin and PAIN activists holding demonstrations inside and outside museums, and opioid survivors confronting the Sacklers in court.
This last example, which comes at the end of the film, is perhaps the most poignant in the documentary. In Perdue’s settlement for bankruptcy, the court required the Sacklers to hear an hour and a half of testimony from victims on Zoom. Poitras lets us watch this testimony, the stunning speeches given from survivors, families who lost children, and even Goldin herself. It is a shocking scene of confrontation: victims of a family’s unspeakable greed directly speaking to that same family about the damage they have caused. “I hope that every face, every single victim’s face, haunts your every waking moment, and your sleeping ones too,” one speaker says, near tears. Here, Poitras zooms in on Theresa Sackler’s face. If you look closely, you can almost see her squirm.
In one of its few archival interviews, artist David Wojnarowicz defends his controversial statements in Goldin’s art catalog about New York Cardinal O’Connor (a “fat cannibal”, in Wojnarowicz words), which prompted the National Endowment of the Arts to pull funding from Goldin’s exhibition on AIDS. Wojnarowicz smiles at the camera as he tells the story: “If, at this time, images and words that can be made by an individual have such power to create this, this storm of controversy, isn’t that great? ” Yes, Poitras insists, it is truly great.