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Nan Goldin the Cinephile, 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.Today, she reflects on Nan Goldin’s love of cinema, from her discoveries of underground film to the Hollywood figures, and shows how this eclectic love of film forms an intimate history of cinema that deeply informs her work.
While Nan Goldin gravitated towards the No Wave movement in the early 1980s, appearing in a number of films from that time onwards, her cinephilia, as bulimic as it is eclectic, began much earlier and sketches out a much longer history of cinema.
This love of films is not tied to any particular period or genre, but composes the most unusual and intimate history of cinema. Sirens, a film that deploys a kaleidoscopic montage of ecstasy, stands as proof of this. It brings together underground filmmakers Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger with an emblematic figure of cinematic modernity, Michelangelo Antonioni, or essays from Henri-Georges Clouzot's last unfinished film.
Nan Goldin, Gina and Bruce’s dinner party, NYC, 1991
Goldin's passion for cinema began in her adolescence, when enrolled in an experimental school, she spent more time in movie theaters than in classrooms. She assiduously frequented the screens of the Brattle and the Orson Welles, two cinemas in Cambridge (Massachusetts) where she discovered the American avant-garde, Andy Warhol, John Waters, and most significantly, Jack Smith's experimental film, Flaming Creatures, a flamboyant orgy whose freedom, at the age of fifteen, gave her the desire to become a filmmaker.
At the same time, she saw Antonioni's Blow up. The famous scene in which David Hemmings photographs the model Veruschka left a lasting impression on her. This mixture of innocence and predation, attraction and violence, also runs through her taste for Pre-Code cinema. Goldin is sensitive to these films produced in the United States before the introduction of the Hays Code, a studio censorship system introduced in 1934 to pre-empt criticism from powerful puritanical associations.[1] . One of the few female directors of this era to have made a career in Hollywood, Dorothy Arzner, so deftly plays with moral and social conventions in her depiction of a couple torn apart by alcoholism and jealousy in Merrily We Go to Hell that it could be seen as a counterpart to Goldin's vertiginous exploration of her destructive impulses in Memory Lost.
Nan Goldin, Greer modeling jewelry, NYC, 1985
She was so overwhelmed by the Hollywood classical cinema beauty queens that she has never ceased to summon their ghosts in her own images, photographing, for instance, the transgender community of The Other Side in Boston. Among the figures that bind together films as different as those of John Cassavetes, Federico Fellini or Jacques Rivette is the passion for actresses, those faces transformed into icons by the mise-en-scene, piercing any being caught in their light.
In the summer of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic had confined audiences to their homes, Goldin was invited by New York's Metrograph cinema to design film programs for a VOD platform. These "sessions", which she herself introduced, included both Nothing But a Man, Michael Roemer's beautiful film about the despair of a Black man in a racially segregated South, and a portrait of her father by a young Argentine filmmaker, Augustina Comedi, who discovered in his amateur films a clandestine archive of his militant commitments and sexuality. It was a concentrate of his love of images and stories, to be consumed without moderation.
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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] Hollywood Babylon, written by filmmaker Kenneth Anger, provides the most corrosive and masterful chronicle of this period from the 1920s to 1934, when the Hays Code - named after Senator William Hays, then president of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) - was implemented by the studios. Between its drafting in 1930 and its application in 1934, the code was not scrupulously applied, and the crude staging of the films made the scenes of violence and sex even more explicit. In this period of the Great Depression, she was also very realistic in her depiction of social misery.
