By David D’Arcy

For once, shame worked. Museums that normally court the robber barons of our era capitulated and took the Sackler name-plates down.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, directed by Laura Poitras. Playing in Boston this Friday at GlobeDocs. Screenings in theaters will begin in November.

Photographer Nan Goldin in the 1970s in a scene from All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Photo: Neon.

Balzac said that “behind every fortune there is a crime.” In the case of the Sackler opiate fortune, built on the deceptive marketing of Oxycontin, you might want to make that a plural: the end result was hundreds of thousands of bodies (perhaps many more) and ruined lives. Laura Poitras’s new documentary examines how one artist became an activist and helped force the Sackler family to consider the human costs of its vast fortune.

A pivotal event in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is the photographer Nan Goldin’s recollection of her near-fatal experience with Oxycontin, the aggressively marketed and staggeringly profitable product of the Sackler-owned firm Purdue Pharma. Her response, upon recovering, was to protest at august institutions where the Sacklers cleansed their reputation with their money and their art. The spectacle of her protest can be inspiring and infuriating, mournful and elegiac. These guerrilla tactics led to the removal of the Sackler name from museums, a clear triumph. And Goldin, who can wisecrack with the best of them, makes sure that her solo narration of that successful campaign has laughs, not just bumps, along the way

The rousing All the Beauty and the Bloodshed won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, a special achievement, since the festival’s organizers may not have known how to spell the word documentary five years ago. The film premiered to cheers at the Toronto International Film Festival. I saw it a second time at the New York Film Festival last week. The film could well be nominated for an Academy Award. Poitras, nominated twice before, won the Oscar for her 2015 doc Citizen Four about Edward Snowden.

The film scrutinizes a special kind of philanthropic culture war, a campaign to hold a family of donors accountable for its addictive product and to hold respected institutions accountable for accepting the Sackler’s tainted money. Is it any surprise that those institutions relented after a pressure campaign? Goldin shows us that she knows how to exert it. She founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which deployed its people at the protests that we watch on the screen. Yes, even the Sacklers could be made to feel pain.

Poitras has usually made films through a political lens — her subjects have included an al-Qaeda ex-prisoner (Osama Bin Laden’s former driver), the embattled Julian Assange, and the exiled Edward Snowden. All those docs were investigative, assembling factual counter-narratives that punctured holes in official stories that were intended to place men in jail or keep them there.

In All the Beauty, Poitras lets Goldin talk — and talk she can — as the film rewinds back from a fraught political battle with museums to the photographer’s childhood as a contrarian in suburbia. When Goldin was 11, her sister committed suicide, a gruesome event which would be a horror for anyone. Goldin tells us that she retreated into rebellion; family snapshots in black and white reveal an awkward home life that looks as if Dianne Arbus observed it. Goldin eventually re-emerged in New York City (after years at the Boston Museum School). She found the closest thing to a home in the sexually experimental and drug-addled downtown scene. Her work watching those around her became the slide show and book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), that made her reputation. She speaks to Poitras of dabbling in stripping and prostitution – so she could buy film, she says. HIV-AIDS, which killed many friends, is another wrenching subject, followed much later by opioids. She took Oxycontin to soften the pain of an injured wrist and became addicted. The photographs she took all along the way are an archive for Poitras’s doc.

A scene from All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Photo: Neon.

Goldin has a lot to say about the family of friends she eventually found in New York and about the loss of so many of them to HIV. Still, she also sees her own pictures , some of those very friends, enter the collections of museums around the world.

Once Goldin recovers from her wrenching opiate addiction — and a close call with fentanyl — she determines to bring the makers of Oxycontin to justice. “I hate them,”  declares. She also sees that her status as an artist collected by major museums gives her the leverage to make her battle public. Here’s how Goldin, in Art Forum, saw things in 2018.

As Goldin leads protesters to lie down in the Guggenheim and then at the Temple of Dendur in the Met (a ruin in the path of the Aswan Dam which the Sacklers paid to install), Poitras shows us a dramatic reversal of roles. This was not a David vs. Goliath standoff. Goldin, the renowned photographer of outsiders, was an established artist who condemned museums in their own galleries for accepting money from prescription drug merchants. The wealthy Sackler family, with gleaming name-plates on doorways and pedestals in New York, Boston, Washington, London, and Paris, shrank from sight, fearful of being exposed and embarrassed. The mega-rich clan had few friends willing to defend them publicly, and fewer museum directors. Goldin, it turned out, could rally a crowd. For once, shame worked. Museums that normally celebrate the robber barons of our era capitulated and took the Sackler name-plates down.

On screen, no one is more surprised by this abandonment of the Sacklers than Goldin and company, whom the Sacklers had stalked and tried to intimidate once P.A.I.N. began its campaign. Yet timing was on their side. Perhaps, because museums are fending off charges these days for failing to show artists of color and for still showing many works of colonial plunder, they may have been reluctant to wage a public battle on behalf of Oxycontin billionaires.

Photographer Nan Goldin in a scene from All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Photo: Neon.

Some film allusions come to mind. There’s Roger and Me, Michael Moore’s pursuit of the chairman of General Motors as the filmmaker’s hometown of Flint reeled from the ruin brought on by corporate abandonment. It is the tale of a city dependent on the auto industry that decamped. But Moore never found GM CEO Roger Smith. The diminutive red-headed Goldin finally catches up with several of the Sacklers, on camera, at a remote court proceeding. They have been forced, as part of a court settlement, to listen to the testimony of opiate victims, including Goldin herself. They fidget nervously, with pained expressions, like suspects with nowhere else to run.

Audiences at festival screenings have stood and applauded at moments when the museums feel cornered, to the point of repudiating the Sacklers. Holding the family accountable in public is indeed an accomplishment. Still, we learn that the Sacklers didn’t go to jail, and managed to transfer huge amounts of money from their company to themselves before a bankruptcy court stepped in. The family that puts profits before people is still rich, and plenty of art given by culprits no more honorable than the Sacklers remains in museums.

Though All the Beauty is about the effectiveness of sustained protest – in this case, at least — it is also about human fragility. The film is dedicated to Goldin’s sister Barbara, who was institutionalized under harsh conditions for behavior that would be commonplace today. The reports that got her locked away flash on the screen so quickly — as archival snapshots — that we’re left wanting to know more. But one offense seems to have been a relationship with a “negro boy.” As with so much in this film, there seems to be more to that story.

Goldin, who endured tumultuous teenage years and the HIV era, succumbed to opiate addiction when a wrist injury made her vulnerable. Her photographs from that time – I’m relying on some fleeting images – evoke a graceful but ominous abstraction, a place where words couldn’t take her. It is time for other artists to step up.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.