‘Beauty and Pain’: pain, sure. But beauty?

Title beauty and pain he has a desire for transcendence, lyricism, subversion. Another thing is that he achieves his goals. Not everyone can be Baudelaire inventing The flowers of Evil. Director Laura Poitras, author of this prestigious and award-winning documentary, is convinced that the woman who stars in it, the photographer, activist and enduring muse of underground Through her work, Nan Goldin has managed to extract the enormous beauty that pain can exude, embodied by crushed people, with tragic existences, cornered by their circumstances or by a self-destructive vocation.

And the lady tells us about her life and that of the people in her problematic and always hypermodern environment. She speaks with disarming frankness and with no hint that she intends to play a character. Torturing memories of her include an abusive father and the suicide of her older sister, early militancy in the universe. queer. Her immersion in lesbianism did not prevent her from combining it with male partners (one of her boyfriends, a pimp who looks like a psychopath, nearly beat her blind). In addition, she worked as a whore for seasons, she became addicted to heroin and later to opiates distributed by pharmaceutical companies, legal and deadly substances, and she saw how the great family that she had chosen was massively devastated by AIDS. In other words, everything has happened to this lady and not exactly bright. But she can still tell.

Someone who is back from so many laps and who has survived, found a cause to fight for. It was his ardent activism in some of the most prestigious museums in the world, the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim in New York, the Louvre in Paris, to denounce an all-powerful family that helped them with their patronage. In addition to their love for art, or for it to help whiten their image, the Sackler family distributed those opiates that have become an epidemic with presumably insurmountable profits, with tons of people hooked in perpetuity or in the cemetery. I imagine that the protest exercised in the temples of art is the most imaginative and pragmatic method that they have found to denounce the bad guys who finance them. In the sacred territory of paintings. And surely the philanthropists are screwed, but the activists should not go too far and expose to damage those paintings that offer authentic beauty (and not all of it desperate) to the inhabitants with palates of any era.

I have a problem with the protagonist of the documentary so heartbreaking. I’m sure her director has done a commendable job, but I don’t feel any sympathy or emotional closeness to Nan Goldin and her very troubled existence. I have never been fascinated by that culture or subculture either. underground that she champions naturally and with experience. I already know that a great band like The Velvet Underground was forged in that universe and few other things that fascinate me (cinema underground, for example, was as horrifying as it was heavy, as pointlessly experimental as it was vacuous), but Lou Reed and John Cale would have made extraordinary music even if they had been born and lived in Villa Coria de Abajo. I still need to feel attraction, mystery, sympathy or understanding for someone who for two hours is telling me about his life from a screen. It is about connecting or disconnecting with that person, regardless of the fact that many uneven things have happened in his existence and that one enjoys both beauty and fears pain.