5 Days of Oscar Docs: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
A week-long guide to the Academy Awards' strongest and most overlooked category.
A sobering New York magazine feature this week proclaimed an “identity crisis” in the world of documentaries, and after several great docs failed to sell out of Sundance, Indiewire’s Eric Kohn recommended that filmmakers stop using the word “documentaries” altogether. But when I wrote a guide to which of 2023’s Oscar-nominated movies are worth catching up with, the biggest problem I had with the nominees for Best Documentary Feature was picking one. There’s no stronger category this year—not even Best Picture has such an unimpeachable lineup. Throw a dart at the Best Documentary nominees, and no matter where it lands, you’ll end up watching something great.
The documentary category is also the holder of a less enviable record: It boasts the only nominated feature film with no plans for a U.S. release. More than a year after it debuted at Sundance, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters, which is set in a home for Ukrainian children who have been temporarily taken from their parents by the state, remains without a theatrical distributor or even a broadcast date. (It will air as part of PBS’ P.O.V. series later this year.) Three of the Academy’s documentary nominees are among my Top 10 movies of 2022, and yet they’re still not getting the attention they deserve.
Same as it ever was, right? But better to light a candle than curse the darkness. And even better to light five. So every day this week I’ll be writing an ode to one of the nominees, and I’ll hope they’ll inspire you watch the ones you haven’t.
First up is Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. As a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, I was honored both to vote for the movie and to write the essay heralding its win for Best Non-Fiction Film (which, not for nothing, is already the term many filmmakers in the field prefer over “documentary” ). Since the essay has only been seen by people who attended the NYFCC’s awards banquet in January, I’m publishing it here.
“Survivor” is the epithet our culture bestows on those who have managed, one way or another, not to die. But what do you do when you outlive your friends and your community, when you're blessed with, as the HIV-positive prophet Prior Walter puts it at the end of Angels in America, “more life”?
Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is two stories in one: the story of world-famous photographer Nan Goldin’s crusade to hold art-world institutions accountable for taking money from the Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma helped make opioid addiction a national crisis; and the story of how Goldin survived long enough to take up that banner, when so many around her did not.
Poitras takes us back to Goldin’s upbringing in what she calls “the deadening grip of suburbia,” the death by suicide of her older sister, the queer subcultures she inhabited in Boston, Provincetown, and New York, and the devastating impact of the AIDS crisis on the community that sustained and inspired her.
The line from the the days of ACT UP to Goldin’s current activism is an easy one to draw, but Potrais is careful, even when compressing a life into two hours of film, not to make the connection feel too inevitable. “It's easy to make your life into stories,” Goldin reflects at the beginning of the film, accompanied by a shot of Poitras behind the camera. “It’s harder to sustain real memories.” It’s fitting that Goldin’s best-known work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependancy, is a slide show, a form of projected images that resists the impulse to make fluid connections between them.
Extracting meaning from life without bleeding it dry is the documentary-maker’s dilemma, one that All the Beauty and the Bloodshed resolves by making clear that meaning is something we create out of what we've been given, rather than being bestowed from on high. This isn’t the life Goldin envisioned for herself, if she envisioned one at all, but it's the one time and fortune have given her, and Poitras is there to witness it.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is now playing in movie theaters.
Oh, and I really did not care for the ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, which ends up saying something I think he really did not intend it to. See you back here tomorrow.