Nan Goldin wants to win at the Oscars

NEW YORK (AP) — It’s not always overstated, considering she’s one of the most innovative photographers of the past 50 years, but Nan Goldin is a movie buff. Enormous. Watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” (“Blow-Up. Desire for a Summer Morning”) when she was 15 made Goldin want to be a photographer. She considers “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” her seminal work which includes a collection of some 700 unfiltered images of Goldin’s life, friends, and lovers in early 1980s downtown New York, as a film that he continues to edit and re-edit. He has long dreamed of making a movie, and he still has them. “It’s still my obsession,” says Goldin, sitting at a restaurant table in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, on a recent rainy afternoon. “I watch a movie a day, normally. I see what’s in TCM.” So perhaps it’s no surprise, after all, that Goldin, whose life and activism are vividly portrayed in Laura Poitras’ Oscar-nominated documentary “All the beauty and the bloodshed” be thrilled, even thrilled, to go to the Oscars. She blames Barbara Stanwyck, Judy Holliday and Marlene Dietrich. “I really want an Oscar,” Goldin says, smiling. “I didn’t expect it, but I want it.” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” now in theaters and on video-on-demand, is quite different from a traditional biopic. It juggles both story of Goldin’s life as a gritty and radical New York intimacy photographer, as well as his demonstrations with the group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN) for prescription drug addiction, while lobbying museums in world’s elite to eradicate the Sackler name from their galleries.The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, manufac icant of OxyContin (oxycodone), an opioid drug linked to countless cases of addiction. The film is a rich and provocative fusion of art and activism. Poitras, que ganó el premio al best documentary por la película de Edward Snowden de 2014 “Citizenfour”, yuxtapone los intercambios íntimos de Goldin sur vida y trabajo con imágenes de Goldin liderando protestas dramáticas en el Museo Metropolitano de Arte, el Guggenheim y otros locations. Poitras, who joined Goldin for the interview at Fort Greene, wanted the film to take a historic journey, moving from the sexual repression of the 1950s to Goldin’s portrayals of queer life in the 1970s and 1980s, to the AIDS crisis and Goldin’s current transformation into an activist. The PAIN protests resulted in the removal of Sackler’s name from most museums, including the Louvre and the Tate Modern. “It speaks to both the power of the artist in society and the power of the artist to communicate moral outrage at government failure,” Poitras said. “I wanted it to be epic.” ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,’ which won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, will bring Goldin, one of the most prominent creators of images of many things Hollywood trends to be avoided like complex sexuality, LGBTQ lives and unfiltered reality, at the glitzy epicenter of the industry at the Oscars on March 12. “I don’t think there are too many films as raw as my work. But I don’t think it’s against my integrity to love Hollywood,” Goldin says. “However, I don’t think we give enough credit to the documentary genre. It’s not sexy.” “I was already here when there weren’t gay people making movies. So they try. But they’re rich people, and I never trust rich people.” Watching “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Goldin says, is “a painful experience.” She’s a producer of the film and believes in it. two hours is tough for her. Yet Goldin, 69, enjoys a lot of the trip. It’s rewarding for her to see younger generations react to her work. “I like doing the Q&A sessions and answers,” says Goldin. “I like waking people up.” The opioid crisis has been linked to more than 500,000 deaths in the United States since 1999. Goldin was almost one of them. While he was living in Berlin in 2014, Goldin overdosed on the opioid fentanyl. After wrist surgery, she became addicted to OxyContin for several years. But she doesn’t see her activism in personal terms. had nothing to do with my addiction to OxyContin, or very little to do with it. This is the overdose crisis,” she says. “The group has never been anti-opioid. He was against drugs. It was about use, commercialization and dependence on America. Purdue Pharma and three executives pleaded guilty in 2007 and agreed to pay more than $600 million for misleading the public about the risks of OxyContin. The trials continued. Goldin and Poitras lobbied the Justice Department to bring individual criminal charges against Sacklers and Purdue Pharma executives. In 2020, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to the marketing of OxyContin. Five years after Goldin led protesters in throwing prescription drug bottles into the moat of the Met’s Temple of Dendur, the museum recently held a screening of “All the Beaty and the Bloodshed.” “I am proud of these museums. But there are still problems,” says Goldin. “We’ve only scratched the surface. Your money isn’t exactly ethical either. So that’s the problem. Where are the ethical billionaires? in many ways left Goldin feeling braver about what kind of change is possible and whether people are willing to fight. The night before, Goldin had attended an event with Bernie Sanders and Cornel West. “They were practically children privileged people of Brooklyn,” he said of the audience at the show. “They were cheering wildly, but I don’t know what they were really doing. Documenting history, whether personal experience or political reality, is something Poitras and Goldin have in common, albeit often from very different perspectives. fear chronicles surveillance governs mental health and whistleblowers revealing state secrets. “Images can have this way of reminding us of our history, what people have been through, what has happened,” adds Poitras. Back in Goldin’s office, where pictures of his old friends hang, many of whom are now dead. “They’re all there,” she said. “I keep them alive every day.” The days before, Goldin and Poitras had attended the annual Oscar and BAFTA nominees luncheon in London. Goldin has made some new friends on the awards circuit. “I became a bit of a friend to Paul Mescal. I went out with him in London. We went to see Caravaggio together,” Goldin says with a smile. “I really like him.” “The government should be transparent to the people and the people should have their privacy, and yet we have the opposite,” Poitras says. “It’s this rejection and anger at social stigma and lies, the lies of society and the lies of families.” After a long break, Goldin resumes using his camera. He took it with him to London when he traveled for the BAFTAs. But what catches your eye is no longer the same. “I just started over. But I don’t photograph people. I photograph places,” says Goldin. “I just got out of the habit. Usually I do what I have to do, in a hurry. And I had to photograph people in a hurry for all these years. I don’t have that desire anymore.” But there are new ambitions, or very old rekindled ambitions, in Goldin. He would like to make a feature film, he says, and has a book adaptation in mind. It’s about the banality of violence, how indescribable the violence is,” he says. “Until I turned 65, I was immortal. Now I am mortal,” Goldin says. So I don’t have much time. This is what happens when you reach a certain age. The glow of mortality is bright. So I don’t want to waste it now.” ___ Jake Coyle is on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP