 |
| 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).
