Doc Corner: Laura Poitras with 'All The Beauty and the Bloodshed'
Thursday, November 24, 2022 at 1:00PM By Glenn Dunks
There is a line early in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed where somebody describes the film’s subject, photographer and activist Nan Goldin, as somebody who “knew how to use her power.” I found it appropriate that the director of this movie is Laura Poitras, somebody to whom you could also say knows how to use their power. Poitras is, after all, the filmmaker who has been at the centre of multiple political stories—I mean, it’s rare for a documentarian to be a character in a dramatization of a major news story (she was portrayed by Melissa Leo in Oliver Stone’s Snowden). And to watch a Poitras film is often to be swept up in a swirl of chaos and pain.
Unlike Risk (about Julian Assange) or her Oscar-winning Citizenfour (about Edward Snowden), Poitras herself is not a part of the story here. Nevertheless, her latest is the thrilling and involving work of a filmmaker whose skills feel almost unparalleled. There’s a quiet, almost sneaking, grandeur to her work here as a filmmaker, directing the viewer down the many paths of Goldin’s story with grace, humility and intrigue, and with a technical finesse that is subtle yet entirely specific from one cut to the next.
