TALES OF LOHR: "ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED"
Plus, "This Week in Warhol" catches forty winks
“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
- William Munny (Clint Eastwood), Unforgiven
During my brief residency in Dublin, Ireland, my apartment was just around the corner from the Irish Museum of Modern Art. I visited IMMA on my first Saturday in the city, and one of the featured exhibits there was The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a soundtracked slideshow by American photographer Nan Goldin. These shots, depicting unstudied, immediate vistas of Goldin’s bohemian associates and urban community, marry raw vérité grit with an undeniable, disarmingly tender intimacy. This display, despite its presentation in a prestigious European art space, was elementally similar to slides of your uncle’s trip to some Civil War battlefield. Goldin, in a very real way, was sharing with me her family photos.
It’s a family that has borne more than its share of tragedy along the way, and Goldin’s tumultuous personal story, and how it has informed her potent political activism, is the subject of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the new documentary from Laura Poitras, an Oscar winner for 2014’s Edward Snowden portrait Citizenfour. This film, like the Snowden doc, centers on a singular figure risking their professional reputation (and possibly their safety) to take on the very institutions that helped them secure that reputation. But while Snowden was a relatively obscure person prior to his decision to turn whistleblower, Goldin was an important force in the contemporary art and photography firmament before life sent her a windmill at which to tilt.
That lofty target was the Sackler family, the billionaire clan whose Perdue Pharma were the manufacturers of OxyContin, the pain-relief medication that has proven to possess wickedly addictive side effects. Awareness of this potential epidemic of addiction in the making did not sway the Sacklers from fast-tracking the public spread of this medication; internal memos from Purdue quote one of the Sacklers predicting a “blizzard of prescriptions” on the horizon. Such was the case…and along with that blizzard came a hurricane of drug dependency, escalations to harder narcotics, ruined lives, and mass death.
Goldin herself was prescribed OxyContin following a surgery. She ramped up to taking six times the recommended daily dosage, and, when that began to lose its effectiveness, graduated from simply popping the pills to crushing them up and snorting them. This eventually culminated in accidental ingestion of a near-fatal dose of fentanyl, an even more lethal prescription concoction. Goldin thankfully survived, and her experience, and the mounting death toll around the country, led her to start P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), with the goal of not only bringing legal action against the Sacklers, but curtailing their other major cultural activity: the endowment, via generous gifts of blood money, of eponymous wings and galleries at many of the world’s major museums, the kind of institutions where Goldin herself has a considerable worldwide presence.
Poitras understands that Goldin’s crusade against the Sacklers did not emerge out of the blue, but is the natural evolution of a life touched at every turn by both addiction-instigated loss and the embrace of marginalized, sometimes even demonized subcultures. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is thus not just a piece of agitprop, but a full cinematic treatment of Goldin’s life and career, with the artist (who co-produced the film with Poitras) narrating much of her own story in a soft, weather-beaten voice flecked with very real pain. Goldin is the product of a deeply conformist home forever scarred by the suicide of her beloved elder sister Barbara, whose emerging, unconventional sexuality was met with all the callous misunderstanding middle-class ‘50s parenthood could muster.
Eventually making her way to New York, Goldin’s life becomes a magical mystery tour of the late-20th-century alternative American scene. Stints as a bartender, go-go dancer, and sex worker (which she calls, with full respect, “one of the hardest jobs you can imagine”) were interspersed with the incessant photo-taking that turned her own rowdy, revelling circle of friends into the works of art so many of them nonetheless managed to become in their own right. Along the way, Goldin’s world welcomes such remarkable figures as androgynous fellow photographer David Armstrong, a friend from her early, exploratory teenage days; multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz, a caustic spokesperson against the government’s apathy in the face of the burgeoning AIDS crisis; and the remarkable Cookie Mueller, writer, mother, star of early John Waters movies, and herself an AIDS casualty at the shockingly tender age of 40.
Goldin’s photos depict all of these figures and more with complexity, understanding, and love, and Poitras is an intelligent enough filmmaker to center many of the story’s most affecting moments around nothing more than parades of Goldin’s photos, accompanied by the artist’s own narration. What becomes clear, as the film progresses, is that throughout her life, Goldin has found herself as part of groups that the society around her deems somehow deviant, and that the misfortunes that sometimes befell her and her friends were often regarded by the world at large as a cosmic punishment for their perceived sins.
Goldin recalls being told on numerous occasions that there were no worthwhile female artists, and though she laughs when remembering the blowjob she was forced to give a cabbie as payment for a lift to her first important gallery interview, the anecdote emphasizes the extremes to which poverty can push those who experience it. Goldin is likewise held up to skeptical scrutiny for her egalitarian sexuality and history as a sex professional (not to mention a no-holds-barred photo series depicting her own sexual life); she uses the camera to document her physical abuse at the hands of a jealous lover who, in a heinous targeting of a photographer, attempted to blind her with his fists; as a member of the creative class, who were particularly hard-hit by AIDS, she bears the cultural stigma of association with a disease that many felt was cosmic retribution to its sufferers. And Goldin’s fentanyl overdose was not her first experience with narcotics. She speaks frankly about both the challenges of addiction and the hell that is withdrawal, and she makes plain her feelings about the nature of drug dependency when, in a public testimony, she refers to addiction in medical terms, as “substance abuse disorder.”
Not surprisingly, there is plenty of sadness and pain in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, from the anguish in the voices of surviving relatives of addiction casualties, to the brooding, vocal-inflected music score by Soundwalk Collective. But Poitras takes pains to express both sides of her film’s title (the phrase comes from a statement by Barbara Goldin, quoted by doctors in paperwork from the orphanage where Goldin’s mother interred her challenging child for a time). It’s there in the affectionate home movies of Cookie Mueller with her son, and the photos from Mueller’s wedding to gifted cartoonist Vittorio Scarpati. It’s there in the high-spirited excerpts from Goldin-featuring films by fellow artist and friend Vivienne Dick. And it’s there, ultimately, in the triumphs P.A.I.N. scores against the Sacklers, with the Louvre, the Met, the Guggenheim, the Tate, and numerous other major artistic organizations stripping the family’s name from their spaces, with many also refusing to take any more money the family earned off the deaths of addicts and the pain of their surviving loved ones.
Goldin and Poitras are, of course, both artists whose work binds them inextricably to reality, and the film does not shy away from the ways in which the Sacklers, like so many rich death merchants before them, have escaped their just desserts. But Goldin’s very life, in many respects, represents a type of overarching victory over the forces that would push her down due to her gender, her sexuality, her upbringing, her addictions, her pleasures, her professions, and her choice of friends. Despite the hurt and heartache All the Beauty and the Bloodshed presents, Nan Goldin endures, just as her fallen friends have persisted through her loving vignettes of their lives together…and just as Goldin’s work, and now this film, will remain long after the artist herself has left us, whenever and however she goes.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is currently playing in limited release in theaters around the country.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
JANUARY 17, 1964
Sleep, regarded by many scholars and critics as Andy Warhol’s first “official” film, premieres at the Gramercy Arts Theater in New York City. The screening is a fundraiser for the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing and promoting avant-garde and underground cinema.
Warhol has begun experimenting with the motion picture camera the previous summer, and he first conceives of the concept for Sleep during a weekend visit to the Old Lyme, Connecticut home of fellow artist Wynn Chamberlain. During that trip, Warhol’s companion, stockbroker and aspiring poet John Giorno, awakens to find Warhol watching him sleep. On the journey back to New York following the visit, Warhol tells Giorno that he wants to make him a movie star.
Warhol films Sleep over the course of several nights, shooting the black-and-white, silent footage on a borrowed 16mm Bolex camera (the artist will purchase his own Bolex before the summer is out). Unlike many of Warhol’s subsequent films, which will consist of single camera setups, Sleep features no fewer than 23 separate angles of the action. And that action consists of nothing but Giorno catching his rest. Occasionally, the slumbering writer shifts his sleeping posture, smacks his lips, or turns his head from one side to the other. But beyond this, nothing occurs in the film, hewing to the intensely minimalist aesthetic of Warhol’s earliest forays into cinema.
Warhol’s original vision for the film is an eight-hour epic, corresponding roughly to the recommended daily sleep allowance for an average adult. But the limitations of Warhol’s camera, and the expense of filming eight hours’ worth of footage when said camera only accommodates three-minute rolls of film, means Sleep falls short of this eight-hour goal (which he would later achieve with the following year’s Empire, shot on a camera capable of holding a 33-minute roll of film). Still, Warhol is able to extend the length of his film via a number of creative solutions. First, though the film was shot at the standard speed of 24 frames per second, he chooses to screen the work at the slowed-down “silent” speed of 16 fps. Also, Warhol makes extensive use of loop printing in preparing the film for exhibition, recycling reels into relentlessly repetitive skeins of pure cinematic stasis. One long section near the middle of the film repeats the same three-minutes-and-change segment of slumbering Giorno on his back for almost ninety minutes. The version of Sleep that premieres at the Gramercy runs five hours and twenty-one minutes in length.
Though Warhol has screened individual reels of Kiss prior to the Sleep premiere, the latter film is the first Warhol cinematic piece to be screened as a whole, completed work. Early screenings of the film feature a radio playing in the theater, giving the film a bit of a dramatic boost by at least providing viewers with some background music to accompany the content-free visuals. But Warhol eventually abandons the radio, leaving the Sleep audience with nothing but the chatter of the camera, the flutter of Giorno’s eyelids, and their own mounting frustration. Nine people arrive at the Gramercy for the premiere event, but only two are remaining when the lights come up at the end of the five and a half hours.
The stark, boldly non-narrative Sleep ultimately acquires a patina of legend. Subsequent generations of scholars will suggest that the film indeed runs eight hours, with a few even hinting that the original cut of the film actually extended over a full 24 hours. And while the film is not without its early defenders (experimental filmmaker Thom Andersen, who sees the film at a Los Angeles art theater, praises the work for its ability to evoke in viewers a meditative Zen state), there are just as many like the admittedly possibly apocryphal attendee at an early exhibition, who, about midway through the projection, runs up to the screen to yell into one of Giorno’s ears, “WAKE UP!”
Paul Morrissey, who goes on to a subsequent career as the major creative force behind the Warhol-presented sex farces of the 1970s, attends an early show of Sleep, leaves about an hour in, and doesn’t see another Warhol film for almost two years. It is not known whether or not Warhol ever sits through the entire film himself, but in his 1991 book Stargazer, Stephen Koch shares an anecdote about Film-Makers’ Cooperative official Jonas Mekas lashing Warhol to a chair during a Sleep screening, intending to put the filmmaker through the same experience he is demanding of his audiences. According to Koch, Mekas checks in on Warhol about two hours into the film, to find nothing but an empty chair and an unknotted length of rope.
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