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Endless assembly, 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. This text focuses on the way her slideshows reinvent montage as an open form, between memory, music and moving images.
So intimately does every atom of mine belong to you.
Nan Goldin's projected slide shows blur the boundaries between still and moving images. The succession of slides interspersed with black is a reminder that the filmic ribbon too is made up of a series of photograms whose intermittent projection, at a set cadence, produces an illusion of continuity. But if the syncopated scrolling of the slides is so closely related to the cinematic experience, it's also because it proceeds from montage effects. Like shots in a film, the photographs are arranged in sequences. Together, they weave motifs, tell stories and invent durations from the ellipses that separate them. Unlike a book, a slideshow has no need for chapters or titles; the succession of images constructs its own narrative thread, largely indebted to the soundtrack that determines its rhythm and suggests continuity from one image to the next.
Couple on the blue beach, n.d.
Until 1986, Goldin manually edited the slides - at first, mixing fragments of text with the images, then experimenting with the relationship between music and editing. Working with the filmmaker Vivienne Dick, she gradually associated the pieces of music that form, much more than a soundtrack, the narrative framework of a film of still images. But the sound montage of the photographs also inscribes them in another perceptive experience: from one to the other, it's life that scrolls through the blackness of time.
Still from Sirens, 2019-2020
By working with such durations, editing indefinitely puts the correlation of memory and archive, fiction and document, back into play. Sirens and Memory Lost, two of Goldin's most recent slideshows, experiment with such connections, the former based on found footage, images diverted from their origin, showing the trance of African-American actress and model Donyale Luna in shots filmed by filmmakers Carmelo Bene, Federico Fellini and Andy Warhol, the latter with Goldin's own photographs of her addiction. Both montages seek to describe the experience of drugs, ecstasy and abyss, two sides of the same vertigo that Goldin approaches through the images of another and her own.
In an interview for the magazine Aperture[1], Goldin asserted that the slideshow retained, in his eyes, an "advantage" over film, because it could be constantly reassembled. This indefatigable gesture of reworking images in order to propose new arrangements goes beyond the function of signification of film editing. It is the unfinished nature of the work that Goldin seeks to achieve in this infinite montage. Her slideshows, she says, are her Leaves of Grass, like the manuscript that the poet Walt Whitman kept revising and rewriting right up to his deathbed, a sum of images indefinitely reassembled, conjugating all tenses, embracing all pains, testing all lives.
Other information
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] "Fiction and Metaphor", Nan Goldin, interview with Mark Holborn, Aperture, Summer 1986, p. 45.
