Review by Beatrice On 05-May-2023
The difference between memory and reality is that real experience has a smell and is dirty and is not packaged in simple endings.
Nan Goldin, an internationally renowned photographer: biography, family, images, political struggle.
The Sackler family, owner of the pharmaceutical empire Purdue Pharma LP, now Knoa Pharma.
The documentary story of the meeting/clash of these two realities.
P.A.I.N: Prescription Addiction Intervention Now
A group founded by Goldin to fight the STIGMA surrounding addiction and expose the Sackler family, responsible for producing addictive drugs leading to overdoses and with multimillion-dollar revenue benefiting major museums around the world.
How can we remain silent in the face of this convergence of art, beauty, "philanthropy," and hundreds of thousands of deaths, which amount to a massacre and the shedding of pain and blood?
This is the inexhaustible political struggle undertaken by the illustrious photographer Goldin, who experienced addiction and overdose from the drug OxyContin, which she took as a painkiller for surgery. Once detoxified, she became aware of the Sackler family's responsibility in the opioid epidemic that had plagued the United States since the mid-1990s, causing thousands of deaths from drug overdoses.
Poitras's work goes beyond narrating, through Goldin's own voice, the incredible photographs produced by this artist of the P.A.I.N.'s political struggle. It dramatically intersects with how the artist's biography is inevitably the foundation of her battle.
The acute and ruthless logic that emerges from this reconstruction is to identify the causal pieces that have determined the artist's path.
The first and main piece: the suicide of her sister Barbara.
It was 1965 when teenage suicide was a taboo subject. I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that sexuality and repression played in her destruction. Due to the times, in the early 1960s, assertive and sexually active women were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behaviors, out of control. When she was 18, she realized that the only way out was to lie down on the commuter train tracks outside Washington. It was an act of immense will.
(Nan Goldin)
The mother did not want the truth to be known; they had to speak of an accident... "EVERYTHING BECAME CLEAR TO ME," Goldin says.
Meanwhile, Arthur Sackler wrote to his children: "We want to leave the world a better place than when we entered it"...
The family of art and philanthropy was the same family that produced addiction and death: profiting from people's pain.
Meanwhile, Nan tells her story as a photographer as a possibility of existence, as a response to rebellion and marginalization, to the stigma that society imposes on you: photography has given me a personality and a voice, it has always been a way to overcome fear; it has protected me and given me a reason to live.
She worked as a waitress, a dancer, worked in a brothel to pay for film and portrayed with her shots the power that men had over her, as well as the joy of female sexuality.
Goldin has used her art as an instrument of denunciation and change. With her unvarnished shots, she has portrayed the life of a generation: friends, lovers, drugs, sex, AIDS, violence.
Her work became an instrument of struggle and resistance: it has been a mirror that reflects the world, capable of revealing the harshness and rawness of reality.
How strange life is, that mysterious organization of a ruthless logic for a futile objective.
The most you can hope for is a certain knowledge of yourselves, which you arrive at too late...
A mass of unextinguishable regrets.
05-May-2023 by Beatrice