All The Beauty And The Bloodshed by Laura Poitras - Official Trailer
SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE
Music for Laura Poitras' ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED feat. Nan Goldin
2022
Winner of Golden Lion, Venice
Directed by Academy Award®️-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis.
In her stunning film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, director Laura Poitras traces the life of photographer Nan Goldin across her intimate and political struggles. The photographer—whose life was profoundly marked by her sister’s depression and suicide—has continued to use photography to explore and reveal the beauty and fragility of those on the margins of society.
Upon seeing the film, the Soundwalk Collective freely associated, drawing connections with the work and life of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who was removed from society through confinement in institutions.
In his last poems, written as fragments, while he was plagued by mental illness, Hölderlin renders nature, in all its fragility and ephemerality. The theme of the fragility of life and creation that emerges in Laura's portrait of Nan Goldin served as an inspiration, and was taken up in Hölderlin’s work for the composition of the choral songs and cantus within the soundtrack.
Through the repetition of words and the layering of voices, the lyric scansion operates like a language possessed. Following this same pattern and echoing various styles from sacred music to modern minimalist techniques, the scored music produces a trance that oscillates between grace and madness.
The music is characterised by quivering strings and swells, de-tuning and lingering, shifting around the surreal. As in light going through a prism: music may have a slightly different meaning for each listener, thus creating a spectrum of musical experience, similar to a rainbow of light.
"All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a bone-deep look at a photographer's fight against addiction and the institution responsible for her pain through her gritty lens."
"Masterful"
"Major Work of Art"
Director: Laura Poitras
Editors: Amy Foote, Joe Bini, Brian A. Kates, A.C.E.
Executive Producers: Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann, Clare Carter, Alex Kwartler, Hayley Theisen
Producers: Howard Gertler, John Lyons, Nan Goldin, Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras
Photography & Slideshows: Nan Goldin
Music Supervisor: Dawn Sutter Madell
Music: Soundwalk Collective
Co-Producer: Megan Kapler
Archival Producer: Shanti Avirgan
Archival Co-Producer: Olivia Streisand
Featured Vocalists: Fanny Mulay Winter, Holan Gultom, Sidney Kwadjo Frenz, Youka Snell
Words And Texts: Friedrich Hölderlin
String Sessions: Anthea Caddy, Davis West, Lucas Sanchez, Lucy Railton, Marie Langlamet, Wolf Hassinger, Youka Snell
Conducting And Arranging For String Quartet: Zacharias Falkenberg
Arranging For Orchestra: Johannes Malfatti
Additional Arrangements: Aurelien Rivière
Musicians Casting: Dhanesh Jayaselan
Recording Engineer: Erik Breuer
Studio Assistants: Heinrich Matis, Rhea Sodemann, Robert Henriques
Recorded At: Analogue Foundation Berlin
www.soundwalkcollective.com
www.analoguefoundation.com
SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE
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