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Barbara Forever, by Alice Leroy
On the occasion of the exhibition devoted to Nan Goldin at the Grand Palais until June 21, 2026, Alice Leroy, teacher-researcher and film critic, offers a series of texts exploring her work through the prism of cinema. In this article, she returns to the founding figure of Barbara, the artist's late sister, whose memory irrigates her work and echoes other women in the history of cinema, also named Barbara.
At the beginning of all Nan Goldin's work, there is the death of her sister, Barbara Holly Goldin. Barbara is a mirror in which Nan has never ceased to seek her reflection, the matrix and horizon of all images past and future. Her story and the imprint it has left on Goldin's life are at the heart of Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, an installation conceived in 2004 at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and staged again today at the same venue. In this place where so many alienated women were locked up against their will, the martyrdom of Sainte-Barbe[1] and the story of the Goldin sisters seem to replay a ritual through time. It allows us to experience the tragedy of daughters condemned for wanting to escape the authority of their fathers.
Stills from Sisters Saints Sibyls, 2004–2022
More profoundly, it is to this death that Goldin owes her becoming a photographer. Barbara's specter haunts all her images, those that attempt to ward off the loss of loved ones, those that aspire to keep the flesh of memory intact. Goldin has repeatedly recounted her sister's suicide. She was eleven, Barbara eighteen. It was the mid-sixties, in an environment where people feared the judgment of their neighbors, but were not afraid to send their daughters to an asylum for flirting a little too much. Barbara had spent four years in an institution. She had been locked up to put an end to her "bad company". There were plenty of young girls in those days who could no longer embody the model of virtue and silence.
Stills from Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, 2004-2022
Barbara in Mask, Washington D.C
The memory of Barbara conjures up other sibyls, pioneers who ran up against the conventions of their time. They are cinematic sisters, actresses and filmmakers who shook up the industry and the avant-garde throught their independence of spirit. There's Barbara Stanwyck, one of Goldin's heroines[2]. Of all the actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age, she is the one who embodies with the most verve a femininity that doesn't let itself be outdone. Characters played by Stanwyck are sharp-tongued and quick-witted, like Sugarpuss, a slum-dwelling Snow White who teaches slang to eight scholars[3] busy writing an encyclopedia but ignorant of the language of the street in Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire (1941).
Other Barbara's haunt the history of cinema, such as Barbara Loden, who directed a single film in which she also played the lead role Wanda (1971). In it, she depicts the wanderings of a heroine sealed in silence, as unfit for domesticity as for a vagabond life. Then there's Barbara Hammer and her films, which constantly explore queer and lesbian sexuality. And then there's Barbara Rubin, shooting star of the New York underground in the early 1960s. She too grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. When she arrived in New York in 1962, she was seventeen and just out of a psychiatric institution. Welcomed by filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas at the Film-Makers' Coop[4], she moved within the counter-culture, from beat poet Allen Ginsberg to prolific artist Andy Warhol. She herself made just one film, Christmas on Earth, an epic, orgiastic poem inspired by a line from Arthur Rimbaud's Une saison en enfer. The pornographic prose of her film is an eighteen-year-old girl's response to the obedience imposed on her by the world[5]. It's an irreverent revolt, at the risk of madness or death. It is, already and again, Barbara's story.
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Alice Leroy is a teacher-researcher and junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. At the same time, she is developing her critical activities as a member of the editorial staff of Cahiers du cinéma and on the L'Esprit critique program on Mediapart. She is also an associate programmer at the Cinéma du Réel festival at the Centre Pompidou and the Franska Film Festivalen in Stockholm.
Nan Goldin in the mirror of cinema
This article, written by Alice Leroy, is part of a series of texts exploring Nan Goldin's work through the prism of cinema, from her slideshows to her films, highlighting in particular her links with New York experimental cinema. Published fortnightly, this series offers an intimate, cinematic reading of her work, echoing the Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well exhibition at the Grand Palais (March 18-June 21, 2026).
[1] Saint Barbara is said to have lived in the middle of the 3rd century in Nicomedia, Asia Minor (today Izmit, Turkey). Other sources place her birth in Heliopolis (today Baalbeck, Lebanon). She was the daughter of Dioscore, a wealthy magistrate of the Roman Empire, who had her locked in a tower to preserve her virtue. But when he discovered that she had embraced the Christian faith and wished to devote herself to God, he punished her severely. She fled, but was denounced and arrested. Condemned to death, her sentence was carried out by her own father, who beheaded her before being struck back by lightning from the heavens.
[2] Among the programming curated by Nan Goldin in summer 2020 on the Metrograph cinema VOD platform, several were dedicated to the actress.
[3] Gary Cooper, who plays the eighth scientist, urns out to be a prince more charmed than charming.
[4] The Film-Makers' Cooperative is a cooperative of New York filmmakers and artists founded in 1961 notably by Jonas Mekas, then a filmmaker and critic.
