Peter Hujar's Day

 

Director Ira Sachs

director on the set

Peter Hujar and Janet Rosenkrantz

Peter Hujar

PETER HUJAR’S DAY           B                                                                                            USA  Germany  Great Britain  Spain  (76 mi)  2025  d: Ira Sachs

His pictures are exotic but not in a shallow, sensational way.  Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh.  His photographs of animals have that same rare empathy, they are like highly personal portraits.          —Nan Goldin on Peter Hujar

I often have the feeling that in my day, nothing much happens... That I’ve wasted it.                     —Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw)

A memory-play counterpart to Nan Goldin’s blustery female portrait of the underground scene of New York City’s vibrant, gay subculture of the late 1970’s, as depicted in the brilliant Laura Poitras film 2023 Top Ten List #2 All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), as this quiet conversational interview of gay portrait photographer Peter Hujar and journalist Linda Rosenkrantz covers much of the same territory, but in a vastly different style, creating a tribute to a forgotten artist, choosing intimacy, authenticity, and the power of personality in capturing the spirit of the times.  Based on recently rediscovered transcripts from a lost 1974 taped interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall, who played Vicky, very much resembling Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, 1977, with her pretensions to art and intellect in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, 2008), in which she asked Hujar (Ben Whishaw, who, lest we forget, played doomed English poet John Keats in Jane Campion’s Bright Star, 2009) to narrate the events of the previous day in minute detail, a project she hoped to expand to other artists, creating a series of these “day in the life” artistic portraits, but it never materialized, yet there’s something subversive and refreshingly experimental about it.  As he recalls the seemingly trivial details of what happened in Rosenkrantz’s Yorkville, Upper East Side apartment, it amounts to a film-long monologue, a rare illustration of how cinema accentuates the written word, fully embracing the power of language in a tightly compressed cinematic space, working in “portraiture,” much like Hujar, creating a representation of a character always questioning his work, mostly taking place in single rooms, moving from a kitchen to a living room to a bedroom, occasionally venturing onto the roof to have a smoke, seen incessantly smoking cigarettes (only 56 cents a pack at the time, complaining that it went up a penny), often engulfed in a cloud of everpresent cigarette smoke, with the sympathetic ear of Rosenkrantz listening intently to every word, projecting a warm, empathetic presence.  Having known each other since their early 20’s (now in their 40’s), a central aspect is having complete trust and faith in one another, coming at a time when photography was not yet recognized as a serious artform, with few gallery sales or exhibits, and artists barely able to eke out a living, but the published success of Diane Arbus quickly changed that.  In Ira Sachs films, artists and their perception play a role, with Hujar realizing that he lies more often than he thinks, creating a narrative that he thinks makes things easier in developing relationships, while also offering a few casual observations about the sexually permissive subculture of the New York art scene, exposing tenderness, pain, frustration, fear, and love, so there are a lot of feelings bubbling beneath the surface.  Stripped of everything except the bare essentials, this short 76-minute excursion into the bohemian art scene reminds us that Sachs is a quintessential New York City filmmaker, capturing a specific moment in New York queer cultural history and a still-influential art scene, filled with name-dropping some of the more iconic artists of the time, yet to him they were friends and contemporaries sharing the same orbit, revealing a completely different, more intimate side of their lives as he photographed them, offering astute takes on the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Robert Wilson, Vince Aletti, Janet Flanner, Glenn O’Brien, William S. Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Ed Baynard, and Maurice Hogenboom, who are just a small sample size.  Perhaps most compelling is his visit to the “dismal” Lower East Side home of Allen Ginsberg, which he describes as “the most run-down tenement,” surprised by the dilapidated apartments and burnt-out buildings in the neighborhood, sent on assignment to photograph him by The New York Times, but an uncooperative Ginsberg completely ignored him and instead sat on the floor and chanted, something she describes as “ohm-land,” with Hujar refusing to interrupt, claiming, “I can’t interrupt God.”  Later Ginsberg went on various rants about corrupt corporate powers, insisting upon being photographed on the exact site where he was recently mugged.   

Hujar died of AIDS in 1987 at the age of 53, mostly penniless, with his on-and-off again lover and artist David Wojnarowicz (who was 20 years younger) at his bedside in the hospital documenting Hujar's final moments, known only among a certain group of people, yet his individualistic personality shines through.  He left behind a complex and profound body of photographs, where he was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers, documenting the 1970’s and 80’s East Village scene in a pre-gentrification world of cultural, sexual, and artistic revolution before the AIDS crisis in New York during the tumultuous Reagan and Bush eras.  A film that Sachs describes is “about what it is to be an artist among artists in a city where no one was making any money,” all underappreciated at the time, yet Hujar was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards his life and work, a consummate technician, exercising meticulous control in the darkroom, where his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential, receiving only marginal public recognition during his lifetime, but he has since become recognized as one of the most influential photographers of the latter half of the 20th century.  Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way, but he was never as famous as Nan Goldin or Robert Mapplethorpe.  His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but did not sell well, as his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace insured that it was one of the last published works during his lifetime, as his ambivalence toward success, commerce, and the art world at large often led him to shun the limelight.  An exercise in minimalism, an ode to the banality of everyday life, much of this feels like flipping through the pages of someone else’s diary, where even the smallest details feel significant, as they are attributed to this single personality and no one else, yet Hujar is very much in his element among this extraordinary group of artists, who are never seen, but spoken about in a very matter-of-fact manner, allowing us to briefly hang out with them, reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) as he namedrops his way through art history, while at the same time this is a portrait of an extraordinary artist as an ordinary person, featuring just a camera and the sound of a man’s voice recalling what happened the day before, from the time he woke up until the moment he went to sleep, with no rehearsals prior to the filming, which is rare for an actor with this amount of dialogue.  Sensuously shot in mostly natural light by Alex Ashe (who is himself a photographer) on Super 16mm, creating a grainy, analog texture to match the 1970’s setting, fresh off filming Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s dreamy, yet inspired The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024), this offers a masterclass in composition, capturing the changing light as the day turns into night.  Equally compelling is the exquisite editing by Affonso Gonçalves, who just happened to work on Chloé Zhao’s 2025 Top Ten List #4 Hamnet (2025), while also a frequent collaborator of Todd Haynes, Jim Jarmusch, and Ira Sachs, where in a spontaneous moment the extended microphone attached to a boom is seen as a shadow on the wall.  Never attempting to hide its artifice, what comes as a surprise is the use of Mozart’s Requiem, which is almost shocking in its over-the-top grandeur, yet it adds an operatic grandiosity to small, ordinary moments that become elevated with an extraordinary touch of artistry.  Equally revelatory is a liberating moment of just the two of them dancing around the dining room to the rockabilly sounds of Tennessee Jim - Hold Me Tight YouTube (2:16).

Discovering the 36-page book credited to Rosenkrantz (Linda Rosenkrantz - Peter Hujar's Day) of the missing interview transcripts (Peter Hujar's Day - Read The Screenplay) in a gay Parisian bookstore while shooting 2023 Top Ten List #8 Passages, Hujar was a pioneering queer artist, a man whose presence was so calming that Nan Goldin once called him as “human Valium,” turning away from commercial work early in his career to focus on subjects of his own choosing, including his circle of friends and lovers, landscapes, nudes, and animals, looming large as both a brilliant artist and valuable mentor in the Lower East Side avant garde arts/cultural scene of the 1970’s and 80’s.  Evoking a feeling of time and place, with both Hujar and Sachs using the camera as an instrument of intimacy, capturing a surprising amount of emotional depth without resorting to any form of intellectualism, as there is no plot or conflict in the conventional sense, nor are any changes in the characters’ lives depicted, yet in the mind of the filmmaker, the book was radical in its honesty, providing a cinematic landscape of what constitutes a queer artist, where the idea of just two people talking in a room, with no romantic intentions, has perhaps not been done since Louis Malle’s MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981), Jonathan Demme’s one-man autobiographical monologue by Spalding Gray in SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA (1987), or James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour 2015), a fictionalized account of successful American novelist David Foster Wallace recounting his heavily dialogue-driven reflections to a young Rolling Stone reporter.  Having worked with Whishaw before in PASSAGES, both share a deep curiosity about art and beauty, life and queerness, and an interest not limited to movies alone, but including all the various art forms, where the simplicity of the film speaks volumes, as Hujar’s unsparing comments are so authentic, unguarded and raw, filled with moments of self-doubt, spoken so naturally, where his artistic insecurities are on full display, worrying about the high costs of everything, with nothing showy or melodramatic, receiving a barrage of phone calls, spending a lot of time in his darkroom developing pictures, with the names of fellow artists flowing off his lips with ease, where it helps to be well-versed in the New York literary scene of the 1970’s, as otherwise it becomes confusing why these names are given so much screen time.  What these people have created, nobody does anymore, so it feels really distant, a portrait of a lost time, a culture that has disappeared, just like the neighborhoods being discussed which have been razed over from gentrification.  It may be lost on viewers that both actors in front of the camera portraying American artists happen to be British, which you’d never know, rendered beautifully by both, with Hall breaking out some variation of a Bronx accent, but the onscreen presence of Whishaw, in particular, is hypnotic in its subtlety, arguably the actor’s finest hour, as he lures viewers into his highly personalized world and somehow makes even the smallest details matter, as if he actually possesses a photographic memory, like waiting in line the day before, yet recalling the exact price of someone else’s Chinese takeout order.  Literally immersed in a communal art world that has long since passed, this period may be a renaissance heyday of underground New York artists, seen in a totally different light than their public personas, told from a perspective of someone who knew and worked with them all, offering a stream-of-consciousness portrait of a moment in time and the kind of tiny events that make up a day in the life of these iconic figures, some of it amusing, some demeaning, actually sounding more like friendly gossip, yet what crosses Hujar’s mind offers insights into how artists see themselves, as they’re just ordinary people who can produce extraordinary moments that can become timeless.  Sachs was able to collaborate with a 90-year old Rosenkrantz, from sharing photographs to describing in detail her friendship with Hujar, making a film about what amounts to two people talking while sharing their insights, leading to an intimate relationship between the camera and its subject, including a scene that was edited out of the book, KVIFF.TV • Peter Hujar's Day (clip) • Video online YouTube (1:33).

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire

 

Director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

Suzanne Césaire

Aimé and Suzanne Césaire

THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE              B                                                              USA  (75 mi)  2024  d: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered.                                    —Suzanne Césaire (Zita Hanrot), speaking directly to the camera

Cinema has a way of introducing new subjects to viewers, and this is a prime example, as most have probably never heard of this artist, and that is not by accident, but by design.  How does a woman at the center of history simply disappear from it?  Women, and black women in particular, have routinely been erased by history, which has largely been written by white males, so she’s not alone, but emblematic of many who were often overlooked and forgotten. Look no further than Pamela B. Green’s eye-opening Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018) for a masterclass on how men intentionally took credit for the works of one of the earliest female pioneers in cinema, as French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché was nearly forgotten, where her contributions were suppressed from history for over 100 years, but were finally brought to light.  This film similarly opens a crack in a door that has been shut for nearly 80 years, but it raises more questions than answers.  Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is an assistant Queens College professor, filmmaker, and visual artist who makes films concerned with the inner worlds of black women as she explores a forgotten legacy of a remarkable writer.  Accompanying the release of this film, footage was shown as a video installation in art museums entitled Too Bright to See, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Too Bright to See, sharing the same ideas and images from the film, which is an extensively researched experimental essay on the legacy of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, a writer and anticolonial feminist activist from French-speaking Martinique who, along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, was at the forefront of the Négritude, Afro-Surrealist, and Pan-African movements during the first half of the 20th century.  While it’s illuminating, as Césaire was a visionary throughout her entire life, articulating an awareness of the complexity of Caribbean identity that was far ahead of her time, her character, however, is never fully established, as only fragments of her work survive, weaving together archival material with an unconventional cinematic narrative and a modern cast, informed by the director’s interviews with the living children and family of the artist, where the film is daring in its ambiguity, yet it’s really an attempt to communicate with the “spirit” of the artist, like a séance, a choice that can feel obtuse and overly academic.  Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, with a soundtrack by New Orleans singer Sabine McCalla, Sabine McCalla - Full Set | The OnBeat Sessions YouTube (11:23), the film breaks boundaries by constructing re-enactments, staging multiple scenes with the film crew in plain sight, combining surrealist imagery with voice-over excerpts read in French and English, literally immersing viewers in an imaginary “feel” of Suzanne Césaire. Sensuously shot on 16mm by Alex Ashe, feeling minimalist, disjointed, and often hard to follow, the Montgomery Palmetum & Palm Collection in the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami is a stand-in for Martinique in the film, beautifully surrounded by the luxurious wildness of nature, like being thrust amidst the exotic flora and fauna of an Henri Rousseau painting, where the languid tempo, almost as if time has stopped, and lush green beauty of the tropical island is visually seductive, camouflaging a long history of colonial exploitation.  Martinique historically imported over 200,000 slaves who were immediately forced to assimilate to the tropics, facing malnourishment and high mortality rates before slavery was abolished in 1848, but not before enduring three centuries of captivity.  The abolition of slavery did not result in the opening up of economic avenues, continuously mired in dire poverty while suffering from ingrained stereotypes of intellectual and cultural inferiority, French colonialism formed the roots of the repressive society that Césaire lived with and wrote about.  

As if to emphasize the lost or forgotten nature of her legacy, there is no linear progression, instead the film is a dreamlike, free association essay built on fragments and abstract expressions of an artist who has only recently begun to receive the attention her evocative ideas and her distinct style merit.  Starting from the supposition that next to nothing is known about Césaire, as the title suggests, there is a lyrical, songlike, storytelling aspect that deconstructs her life, bypassing any conventional structure, turning this into an avant-garde biopic that is daringly ruminative, based in part on the essay Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics by Terese Svoboda, first published by Guernica in 2017, Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics - Guernica Magazine, as it breaks new ground by finding inventive ways to tell her story, moving between narrative filmmaking and abstraction, utilizing a lyrical richness that is both obscure and eye-opening at the same time, reconstructing the memory of the artist, where the emphasis is on keeping her legacy alive.  Characterized by an uneasy combination of homage and erasure, Césaire’s work in the pantheon of Caribbean literature identifies her as a key figure, yet it is undeniable that the paucity of her works, where only seven theoretically innovative essays on subjects related to feminism, Marxism, and Surrealism were published between 1941 and 1945 and then published nothing for the remaining twenty years of her life, which means that her memory has been overshadowed by that of her illustrious and prolific husband, Aimé.  Together with the help of other Martinique intellectuals such as René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, and Aristide Maugée, they founded the dissident literary review Tropiques in 1941, which established a dialogue with surrealism both as a means of cultural liberation and as a means to obscure political messages for the censors, where her scathing attacks on fascism and racism were camouflaged as reviews of literary and ethnological studies, as those essays were published during a period of unusual censorship, racism, and oppression from an authoritative Vichy government of Nazi-occupied France and were not widely read until the 1980’s, and not readily translated until the late 1990’s.  The most ardent surrealist of the Tropiques collective, embracing blackness as a unifying force and as a means to move beyond colonial oppression, it’s worth mentioning that she was a black woman in an intellectual world dominated by men, working from the mindset of the periphery, as women poets and novelists have historically been excluded by male-dominated movements like Négritude, yet they were among the first public and literary figures to embrace a black identity.  For decades, historical overviews of the era made little mention of her contributions to the cultural renaissance of Martinique, a time when Caribbean students mingled with European intellectuals while studying in Paris, returning home to challenge the cultural status quo and alienation that characterized the French colonial Martinique identity at the time, eloquently described in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, with Césaire writing, “The Martinican has failed because, misrecognizing his true nature, he tries to lead a life that is not his own,” emphasizing the physical and historical space of the Caribbean, appropriating and redefining the legacy of the slave trade. 

Told in a sleepy, tropical manner, where a woman silently sits alone smoking a cigarette in a darkened room of a 1940’s café, with an oscillating fan buzzing overhead as a jazz record can be heard in the background, which sets the stage for frequent close-ups in natural surroundings, while she and her husband Aimé (Motell Gyn Foster) drift in and out of the screen, friends with French Surrealist André Breton (Josué Gutierrez), who visits them in Martinique, blurring the distinctions between past and present.  Blending personal reflection with broader cultural themes, interlinking an imaginary dialogue between the director, French-Jamaican actress Zita Hanrot who plays Césaire, and the artist herself, between Césaire’s words and the screenplay written by Hunt-Ehrlich, the provocative style seems to invite viewers to question what they see and engage in a deeper, more introspective dialogue with history and memory, challenging any idea of an authoritative history or biography, providing stream-of-conscious projections of various strands of thought that touch on history, collective identity, memory, and women’s artistry, where she incisively acknowledges, “Proust wrote in his parents’ luxurious house.  Very sincerely, make Proust a farm worker from Martinique, I doubt he would have written In Search of Lost Time.”  A writer who supposedly destroyed her own creations, simply tearing up her drafts and disposing of them after the war, referred to as “aborted works,” while also referencing her strained relationship to writing while mothering six children (and teaching full-time), her work was constantly interrupted caring for their everyday needs, which may explain the fragmented structure utilized by the director, “In our film, the fragment becomes a central structure and an idea about how cinema can tell stories.  Rather than using it to smooth the asperities of history, cinema precipitates us where the known person stops.  This ballad presents itself as a post-modern romance, a biopic that recognizes that the reasons why we think about history are always influenced by the most pressing needs of the present.”  Lack of information about her life and work persists, despite acknowledgements by colleagues of her indispensable role at Tropiques, describing her lyrical poetic prose as the “soul of the movement.”  Césaire subverted gendered, exoticized representations of the Caribbean islands, as they were used to promote colonial travel narratives from a white tourist industry to help justify continued environmental exploitation, expansionist development, and neocolonial control.  Even today, travel brochures to Martinique present the island as an exotic, truly enchanting, picture perfect postcard with its white sandy beaches.  Her portrait of the region moves back and forth between an outside and an inside perspective to show both the extreme beauty and the troubled turbulence of the Caribbean, believing that the fragmentation of the Caribbean identity permitted its subordination, where her primary relation to place rather than origin distinguishes her from her peers, where her search for empowerment is never utopian, but grounded in reality, refusing to echo the culture in France, while affirming the reality and originality of Martinique culture.  Surrealism was not solely a literary aesthetic, it was also a politically engaged movement that condemned imperialism worldwide.  Railing against the patriarchal-colonialist domination that supports the exploitation of both women and the environment, her work is primarily concerned with assimilation, dependence, and racialized forms of colonial domination.  From The Malaise of a Civilization, Tropiques 5, April 1942:

Understand me well: It is not a question of a return to the past and resurrecting an African past that we have learned to appreciate and respect.  On the contrary, it is a question of mobilizing every living force mingled together on this land where race is the result of the most continuous brazing; it is a question of becoming conscious of the tremendous leap of various energies we have until now locked up within ourselves.  We must now put them to use in their fullness, without deviation and without falsification.  Too bad for those who thought we were idle dreamers.                           The most troubling reality is ours.                                                                                     We shall act.                                                                                                                  This land, our land, can only be what we want it to be.

"The Great Camouflage"  Negritude Women, by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, 2002, which includes Suzanne Césaire’s The Malaise of a Civilization (page 130), Tropiques 5, April 1942, and also her final published essay, The Great Camouflage (page 135) from Tropiques 13-14, September 1945