Laura Poitras, winner of Venice 79: «My eternal battle. Fearless”
Laura Poitras knows her job. But others are hiding inside that profession (we will have the opportunity to talk about it in this interview) and do it, as she does it (taking home an Oscar for Citizen fourhis 2014 film e now the Golden Lion for All the beauty and the bloodshed) means that a lot of extra skills need to be acquired. “How are you going to write this interview? A question and answer or “to run”? ” is (his) first question.
The answers that Laura Poitras calibrates with the care of a lecturer supported by a criminal lawyer are as dense as her films which, handling that incandescent matter which is reality, contain – as its latest title says, almost a poetic verse – blood and beauty. Beauty is entirely the responsibility of the protagonist that the director has chosen to lead her audience into a story, yes, of blood.
Laura Poitras and Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin, photographer, filmmaker, activist is perhaps the artist who, with her work, has exhibited her (and ours) more than anyone else.. The film tells his path, guiding us by the hand through archives, photos, videos and the narrator of Goldin interviewed by Poitras. That story of her – both tragic and beautiful: the Barbara who committed suicide, the prophecy according to which Nan would follow the same fate, the salvation in the creation of a family of choice in the New York underground scene – is inextricably linked to the battle against the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, a company producing an OxyContin drug that heavily aggravated the opioid crisis of the early 2000s.
The opening scene of All the beauty and the bloodshed show a flash mob of the PAIN association, founded by Nan Goldin, in front of the Sackler wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2018. The protesters chant: “Sacklers lie, people die,” the Sacklers lie, people die. Later in the film, Poitras will show the advertising campaign with which OxyContin was launched in the United States in 1996. A well-dressed man magnifies, addressing directly to the camera, the qualities of the drug and guarantees: it is not addictive.
Since 2006 you have been telling with your films an eternal war, from Iraq to the security apparatus of the United States. Is this another war against legal drug dealing?
It is and it is not. There are many connections between this film and everything I’ve done before: once again I’m talking about power, abuse of power and impunity. The films I made about the world born after 9/11 had a more global dimension, the latter the failure of American society is about protecting its citizens. One family, the Sacklers, knowingly decided to promote a drug that killed thousands of people. And the government was unable to intervene to stop the killing. There is also a particular link between this film and Citizen four. Both are portraits of individuals who, finding themselves in the cracks produced by history, have been capable of radical changes, the whistler Edward Snowden and Nan Goldin, artist and activist. They are figures that interest me a lot, individual with an eccentric point of view. There are similarities between Nan, Ed and other people I have met on my travels, people who have refused to rest easy and ignore it, in order to mobilize. And then there is another red thread that unites my films and I am: American citizen, citizen of a global empire, and the duty I have to tell stories about the world where I come from, using the power I have to question it. .
Do you remember your first encounter with Nan Goldin’s work?
I was studying film in San Francisco and working as a projectionist. It was the late 80s, and that night was projecting The ballad of sexual addiction. I have been following Nan’s path ever since, I consider her a beacon for how she has changed the rules of the game and of the story. And then we touched on other occasions. I went to a hippie free school, Nan went there too, but she was thrown out. Which she proudly claims. She was thrown out of it all, nuts. I love her work, but what guided me in the project was the fact that she used to produce her role as an artist for change. Which is pretty rare. Nan took a lot of personal risk in taking the Sacklers head on. They are people with a lot of resources, they can make life really difficult.
Life that becomes art
In the film, his personal and artistic history and his activism dialogue from beginning to end. When did you decide that this was the way?
All the films I’ve made start one way and then become something else. When I went to Iraq I wanted to talk about the occupation and the electoral process, but I met the Iraqi doctor (who became the protagonist of My country, my country, of 2006, ed) and this has messed everything up. I make documentaries, I have a duty to confront reality when it presents itself. Nan made me film the activities of PAIN (the association founded by Goldin, along with a group of artists, activists and people living with opioid addiction in late 2017, ed), I told her I was available. There was a part of her work that I did not know: in 1989 with the exhibition Witnesses: against our disappearance he had recounted the protests of a community besieged by the AIDS epidemic. I have to see the tragic parallels between what was happening and Nan’s account of that crisis at the time. Nan told me. “I’ve lost a generation of friends, I can’t lose another.” Everything that Nan transforms into art comes from her personal experience of her, from her own body, her work is about her, her loves, her friends, the people who live with her. So we started doing interviews, audio only …
Why this choice?
The film is an artist portrait by another artist… He needed intimacy, I never thought of showing up at his house with the camera and the lights. The first interview moved me deeply about what Nan chose to share with me and how she did it. So I decided to continue like this, slowly, one chapter at a time. In that way the connection between the past and the present was gradually clarified and concretized.
Do the people you meet the director remain in your life? Is he always in contact with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange?
Yes, I stay in touch with all of them. Julian is a political prisoner, the charges against him owe me too, I did all the things he did. If the UK signs its extradition to the US it will be an attack on all journalists in the world. If they extradite him, I’ll be next, and many others after me. In effect, the US government will be allowed to target any journalist reporting war crimes. Even with Ed Snowden we feel, he is happy not to be in an American prison. He often reflect on the state of exception that the United States: we are anything but innocent, but we love to call ourselves defenders of freedom.
The role of journalism
Is the documentary in the function taking the place of journalism of investigation, denunciation and production of critical thinking?
We need to raise the standards of journalism, try to reach wider audiences through quality journalism, get out of the news stream, to also talk about questions that are universal, find common grounds for reflection. And this can also be done by a good investigative documentary which is journalism plus something else. Nan’s stature is precisely responsible for the fact that major American personal museums have distanced themselves from the Sacks and the fact that she herself was addicted to the drug and could talk about it from one point of view produced the change, without her courage not would be successor. But the role of investigative reporters like Patrick Radden Keefe (interviewed in All the beauty and the bloodshed as the author of the 2021 book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynastyextension of his article of the New Yorker in which he denounced the deaths from oxycodone, ed) was very important.
How powerful the Sacklers are got a taste with the series Sick of drugs…
Which is a good series, especially in the representation of communities and the figure of the doctor (played by Michael Keaton, ed) who thought he was doing the right thing for his patients by prescribing the drug. Nan risked her career by taking a stand against the Sacklers.
Maybe she’s risking it too. She is worried?
(tour) The risk is there and it is not small. But I invite them to come and get me. For sure keep an eye on us. And they certainly have been watching Nan for months. It is no surprise that they have private investigators. Maybe I’ll have to hire more lawyers. But I think the Sacklers deserve all of this. And even more.
This is not new to her. She has been under surveillance for a long time, so much so that she has decided to leave America and move to Berlin.
The harassment I suffered every time I passed through an American airport had become unbearable. And I am proud that my biographies always report: “under surveillance of American counterterrorism”. Because it helps, I believe, to remove the stigma from the many innocent people guarded by counter-terrorism. Maybe someone doesn’t have my zest. Or my passport … I feel like I’m always being chased by a shadow: the Espionage Act, the law they called into question against Julian, could also be used for me at any time. But that’s not what worries me, the reason I left is that every search involved the seizure of the notes I carried with me, so I started leaving the hard drives with the materials in Europe, and then everything else. After traveling to Hong Kong to meet Snowden (for the filming of Citizenfour, ed) it was clear that if I returned to the US I would end up in prison. So I stayed away for a while, until the government realized that arresting one of us shouldn’t stop the story from being told.
It would have been a boomerang for the notoriety he had achieved in the meantime, the Oscar …
If they would have been able to block the story, I don’t think they cared about notoriety. I think you should include this story in your article: a year ago the newspapers wrote about the CIA’s plan to kidnap Assange and assassinate him. Glenn Greenwald and I (American journalist, founder of the journalism site theintercept.comco-star of Citizenfour, ed) we would have been charged with espionage. And this was happening under Obama, the president who opened the dams to the indictment of journalists on the basis of the Espionage act.
Now is she back to live in America?
I live between America and Berlin. I have an obligation to where I come from. I’m not going to start making films about Germany: I have my opinions, but that’s not my job.
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