“Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face,” a brisk and illuminating documentary directed by Sabine Lidl, is less a portrait of the artist than a portrait of her friends. For Goldin, of course, the two are intertwined. Diaristic in nature, her photographic work — including the still earth-shattering “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” first published in 1986 — trades in the traditional perspective of objective distance for a view from within. Her subjects are the people she spends her time with, an endless parade of friends and lovers — the two often representing the same thing — that she captures with a startling amount of intimacy.
Because of her focus on decadent lives, Goldin has been criticized as less a photographer than a documentarian who happens to be in the right place at the right time. Place anybody with a camera in a room with interesting people, the thinking goes, and a few great shots will emerge. This line of thinking has led in many ways to an appropriation of her work by the current snapshot-obsessed generation. What is Instagram really if not a bunch of people who believe that the above is true? Maybe we can call it the ballad of social-media dependency.
But Goldin is more than just a snapshot artist. She’s what the writer Luc Sante described as a “portraitist of souls,” and her work is visually and narratively invested in the lives of her subjects. The film, through a series of vignettes that follow Goldin as she hangs out with different old friends who have been the subjects of her work, understands this perfectly. One friend, a man Goldin was in love with — in truth, she seems to be in love with all her friends — is photographed delicately, even innocently. Another friend, a curator, is photographed heroically. The relationships and the formal properties of the images are one in the same.
Goldin, for most of the film, seems reluctant to talk openly about her life. The work says it all, certainly. But by capturing these interactions we begin to get a rough autobiographical sketch of an artist who felt alienated from her family since a very early age and has forever been seeking a replacement in the lives of others. We get brief glimpses of her biological family, just to remind us that one exists, but the importance is placed on the surrogate family, the one that exists in the world of the photographs.
The film is just over 60 minutes. Such a brief portrait would not normally do justice to an artist of such importance, but there’s not much to untangle in Goldin’s life. The public and private realms clash into each other and are on full display in her work, which tells us everything.
“Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face” is making its New York premiere with a weeklong theatrical run as part of the KINO! Festival of German Films, June 13-19.
