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).

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

 

Writer/director Raven Jackson

Jomo Fray, Kaylee Nicole Johnson, and Raven Jackson

ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT        B                                                                                 USA  (92 mi)  2023  d: Raven Jackson

A meditative and visually intoxicating film, more like a lyrically contemplative photo essay than a movie, made by an award-winning filmmaker, poet, and photographer from Tennessee (but her mother and grandmother are from Mississippi) with a Master’s Degree from both New York University’s Graduate Film Program and the New School’s Writing Program.  Jackson explores rural Mississippi landscapes with indefinable human experiences and emotions, seemingly spawned from Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), while mixing in the dreamy and poetic resonance of Terrence Malick, specifically the near wordless To the Wonder (2012) or the transcendent 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life, exploring the immensity of the natural world around us with the tiny, claustrophobic space we actually inhabit.  As if inspired by a different era, the film recalls David Gordon Green’s lyrical George Washington (2000) or early Lynne Ramsay shorts like Small Deaths (Lynne Ramsay, 1996) - YouTube (11:13) or GASMAN (1998), Gasman Lynne Ramsay 1997 YouTube (14:30), where we almost never see the completeness of any scene, yet the intimacy on display is stunning, with the title referring to the practice of eating clay dirt, a common practice among poor blacks who live in rural areas of the American South, with suggestions that in the most remote corners of the earth, in the backroads, there are a multitude of tears that go unseen by the rest of the world, yet ultimately this deeply introspective film is about connection.  Premiering at Sundance in 2023, this is the second A24 film produced by noted director Barry Jenkins following the success of 2023 Top Ten List #7 Aftersun (2022), as the National Board of Review lists it among their Top 10 Independent Films of the year, with a visual design inspired by a 2017 book of photography (William Ferris: The South In Color) in rural Warren County and throughout Mississippi that features 100 color photographs from the 1960’s and 70’s, including the Rose Hill Church that is featured in the film.  Shot along the tributaries of the Yazoo River, the 35mm cinematography by Jomo Fray is nothing less than stunning, creating a bold, impressionistic mosaic that follows a young black girl’s life in rural Mississippi through various stages in her life, using three different actresses to play her, told in a non-narrative, stream-of-consciousness style that accentuates a lingering internalized expression of life itself, embracing joy and pain, heartbreak and grief, exploring shared moments in a life that connects the surrounding natural world to an existing black culture, creating an intersection between cinema and photography in a quietly reflective tapestry of interwoven, interior realms, themes in common with Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama (2023).  There’s something very unique in Southern communities that’s specific to the region, whether it’s the soil, the people, the culture, or the conditions, and art has a lot to do with it. 

The unconventional nature of this decades-spanning film is startling, intentionally breaking conventions, told in a very unorthodox manner, much like poetry where you experiment and play around with form, as this is basically a series of kaleidoscopic vignettes all strung together, jumping back and forth in time with no narrative link, feeling more random, leaving viewers in a freefall of associative imagery surrounding a single character, Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson), short for Mackenzie, a little girl in pigtails seen in the opening learning to fish in the river with her father Isaiah (Chris Chalk), where she’s just as interested in stirring the mud in the dirty water, establishing an early link with the world around her, while we also hear the sounds of birds chirping and cicadas buzzing in the forest setting.  Bringing their catch home, they have enough for a fish fry, with her mother Evelyn (Sheila Atim) showing her the proper way to use a knife to skin it while her father scales the fish, where these parental instructions have been passed down through the ages.  We cut to scenes of joy and innocence, with Mack riding her bike through town, racing her childhood friend Wood (Preston McDowell), or joined by her younger sister Josie (Jayah Henry, with an imprinted birthmark on her eyelid), seen practicing kissing on the back of their hands before jumping ahead into a different time period, as her mother teaches her how to put lipstick on, with Mack changing to Charlene McClure in high school, Josie to Moses Ingram, and Wood becoming Reginald Helms Jr.  Using as little dialogue as possible, Jackson exposes flashes of memory, which allows these recurring images to linger in your imagination before moving on to another incident, like witnessing a tragic fire to the Mack family home, where a frantic feeling of pain and helplessness registers, showing how easily a home can be stripped away, as systematic displacement was a prominent theme for blacks in the 1970’s.  Edited by Lee Chatametikool, a frequent collaborator with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, you get different versions of these same characters at different stages in their lives, as it’s an experimental coming-of-age yet also cycle-of-life film, with carefully chosen moments from a single person’s life, showing how our relationship changes with the world around us as we grow, yet something intrinsically familiar remains, which are the traditions passed on by each successive generation.  Very little happens on the surface, with Jackson instead channeling what’s going on underneath the surface, challenging the audience to trust their emotions, where there’s even a companion book accompanying the film release, Stories From a Place Where All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.  Mostly expressed in long takes, where hands, in particular, seem to have been singled out to symbolize loving affection, they are the connecting tissue between disparate moments, creating a state of grace, like an homage to French filmmaker Robert Bresson.

The critique of the film is how much patience is required and how difficult it is to establish an emotional connection with what might feel like an incoherent experimental narrative, as this is a style over substance film, where the use of music is sparingly used, but an early standout scene shows Mack’s parents slow-dancing to Gladys Knight & The Pips "If I Were Your Woman" on The Ed ... YouTube (2:36) and Roberta Flack’s Roberta Flack "Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye".wmv YouTube (4:20), a foreshadowing moment where the romantic mood from the evocative 1970’s lyric immediately transitions to the sudden death of her mother, with the funeral taking place at the Rose Hill Church (returning later for a gorgeously realized wedding scene), captured in a picturesque verdant setting sitting atop a hill.  We float from one sequence to the next, like a reverie, as past and future spill into the present, sweeping us through various stages of time, as Mack and Wood lament the life they never had together in a long-held embrace, where their once promising romance faded away when she was unwilling to leave with him to pursue a better life, yet they have unmistakable chemistry between them.  Rather than spelling out plot points, Jackson evokes Mack’s inner life through the sights, sounds, textures, and emotions that have stuck with her over decades, infusing the timeless poetry of water, dirt, wind, and rain, with repeated shots of rivers and thunderstorms, and the muddied soil, as the timeline is marked by subtle changes in Mack’s braided hairstyles, where heritage and history are an ongoing ritual that continually restages the past, transforming what we see into something sacred and precious.  When Mack becomes a mother of her own, with an infant baby pressed warmly to her chest, she is reminded of her own mother, where one of the more striking scenes shows Evelyn holding Mack as an infant, rocking her in her arms, demonstrating how traditions are carried from one generation to the next, evoking a special bond between mothers and their daughters.  In another scene, a pregnant Mack lies in her bathtub, and in the next, we see Evelyn bathing Mack as a toddler in the very same tub, yet her discernible fear of motherhood drives Mack to reluctantly give her child to Josie to raise, a conspicuous moment expressed mostly through glances across a kitchen table.  Zainab Jah is a somewhat older Mack, seen lost in her own reflections by the river, where a stream of hypnotic imagery offers context for the memories she is processing, which may in fact be the film we are watching.  There is no beginning and no end, Mack says to her young daughter Lily (Robin Crudrup) as she talks about the water from the rain, instead “it just changes form.”  Inspired by black family albums that are kept oversized, preserving relatives behind hard plastic, they act as portraits of recorded American history without the stifling racial exclusions from prejudice and bigotry, a true narrative of America, where the walls of the home also include framed portraits of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, staples in black households during the 70’s.  The sound design by Miguel Calvo is astonishing in its detail, as Jackson sculpts a captivating portrait of black heritage and identity through languorous tones, abstract textures, and a female perspective grounded in place and community.