“Peter Hujar’s Day” Gives the Past a New Life
What’s the point of talking pictures if the people in them don’t talk? The characters in Ira Sachs’s films always express themselves volubly, even when there’s plenty of action (rewatch the ardently kinetic “Passages”), but in his surprising and boldly imaginative new drama, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” talk becomes the action. It’s a bio-pic, of sorts, about the photographer of the title (played by Ben Whishaw), who, on December 19, 1974, was interviewed by the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), at her apartment, on the Upper East Side. Rosenkrantz was planning a book about how artists spend their time and asked Hujar to recount, in detail, what he’d done the previous day, from the time he woke up until the time he went to sleep. Eventually, Rosenkrantz abandoned her project, and the tape of the interview was lost, but, in 2019, a transcript turned up at the Morgan Library, where Hujar’s archives are held. It was published by Magic Hour Press in 2021, and that text is, for the most part, the script for Sachs’s film.
The day that Hujar described to Rosenkrantz, December 18th, was a busy one. It started with a phone call from an editor, another from Susan Sontag, and the editor’s visit to Hujar’s loft, on East Twelfth Street and Second Avenue. There was a trip to Allen Ginsberg’s apartment, a few blocks away, to photograph him for the Times; a bunch of telephone calls, a visit from the writer Glenn O’Brien, a dinner with Vince Aletti (a contributor to this magazine) and a walk to get takeout for it; finally, a long evening working in his darkroom to develop and print photos, including the ones he’d just taken of Ginsberg.
In the interview, Hujar doesn’t merely itemize this whirl of activity but gives it dramatic urgency, psychological weight, and social scope by delving into the personal connections and backstories—the fundamentals of career, friendship, pleasure, and money—that underlie the day’s events. The result is an exalted transfiguration of uninhibited gossip, breezy but earnest, carefree and provocative. Hujar sends forth a parade of names: along with Sontag and Ginsberg, he discusses William S. Burroughs (scurrilously, possibly slanderously) and also mentions Janet Flanner (a longtime writer for this magazine), Lauren Hutton, Fran Lebowitz, and Robert Wilson (all of whom he photographed). Describing a phone call from the painter Ed Baynard, Hujar mocks him as garrulous, calls him “totally insane,” and adds, “If this ever gets printed, I hope it’s printed with his name.” Rosenkrantz mock-indignantly responds, “What do you mean, ‘if’?”
In Sachs’s film, none of Hujar’s busy day is shown onscreen. Instead, Peter and Linda are seen mostly in her apartment, during the interview, talking, talking, and talking, from daytime until twilight. But, though the movie may be all talk, it’s a highly image-centered work nonetheless. Sachs films the pair in a variety of places and postures—sitting face to face in her living room, standing in the kitchen, lying down on her bed. Peter perches on a windowsill, reclines on a sofa, sits at the bench of her piano, paces around, pokes through her books and records, and puts on a 45 (Tennessee Jim’s “Hold Me Tight”) that they dance to. They go out to the terrace and up to the roof, and their enduring friendship, their ease of communication and evident familiarity, gives the gathering a graceful air of complicity, of artistic collaboration.
Rosenkrantz never wrote her book but, in a sense, Sachs completes it for her—not in scope, of course, but in depth. Converting the text of the interview into a movie brings it to life in three distinct ways. The interview’s first cinematic life is the drama onscreen, the depiction of Peter and Linda’s conversation. For Sachs, the talk is more than a meeting of the minds, just as his images are no mere recordings of Whishaw and Hall’s keenly inflected performances. The film’s shots, though deftly unintrusive, are carefully composed to lend conversational moments sculptural weight. Long takes emphasize the mental labor of Hujar’s self-exploration, and Sachs’s framing (with cinematography by Alex Ashe) crowds the pair together to evoke the intimacy of their talk. What’s especially striking is the sparing use of closeups. Sachs presents his characters’ intellect and emotion, their artistic energy, as inseparable from physicality: he avoids the cliché of talking heads and realizes the idea of talking bodies.
The second way that the film brings the interview to life is in the evocation of the day being described. There are no flashbacks or archival clips in “Peter Hujar’s Day,” no images of anyone but Peter and Linda. But the narrative that unfolds conjures imposing images in the mind’s eye; indeed, the movie’s most indelible depictions may be imaginary ones. Peter is a visual thinker, a photographic talker, describing his surroundings with a precise and artistic eye. His account of picking up takeout at a Chinese restaurant gains a mock-epic grandeur from a fine-grained description of another customer, who was drawing on a small piece of paper and whom he saw minutes later, at a convenience store, pen still in hand. This attention to detail means that the narratives of his time with Ginsberg, his dinner with Aletti, his work in the darkroom all create powerful images for the viewer—a visual track parallel to the one onscreen. This procession of imaginary images is rendered all the more dramatic by the psychology underpinning Peter’s monologue: his passionate reflections on his social circles and his world of work, his urgent conception of what he’s trying to achieve with a camera.
The third cinematic life that the film bestows on the interview is the moment of filming. Sachs emphasizes, from the start of the movie, its artifice, exposing the nuts and bolts of its creation; the action begins with a view of the slate used to mark the scene and help synchronize the sound. Shooting on film, rather than digitally, Sachs occasionally retains, in the editing, the untrimmed beginnings and ends from rolls of film. One scene conspicuously features the sound recordist’s microphone boom alongside the slate. The action cuts freely from place to place in the apartment and from pose to pose of its characters, even as the talk unspools uninterrupted. (There are also a few changes of clothing from shot to shot.) These ways of filming and editing build subtle but unmistakable seams into the movie’s texture and push the seams into the foreground. The effect is to pull Rosenkrantz’s interview with Hujar—and indeed the subjects and the people who are discussed—into the present tense.
By making Hujar’s presence so tangible, Sachs calls attention to a cruel absence: the artist died of aids, in 1987, at the age of fifty-three. (Rosenkrantz, born the same year as Hujar, is still alive, at ninety-one.) Hujar’s death is never explicitly referenced, but passages of Mozart’s Requiem on the soundtrack heighten the haunted feel of Sachs’s present tense. “Peter Hujar’s Day” is a requiem for Hujar and for the many other members of the downtown art scene lost to aids, victims not only of the disease but also of the stigmatization and persecution of gay men that shadowed the era. Sachs, without footnoting his movie in any way, evokes this history and Hujar’s place in it. The day that Hujar lived and described, in December, 1974, comes off not as a set of isolated incidents but as a cross-section, both sociological and novelistic, of an entire world, one that vanished with the early deaths of many of its most vital creators. Hujar’s death was famously commemorated in a photograph taken in the moments after he died by David Wojnarowicz. Sachs’s film is all the greater for not showing this, and for creating a personal work of mourning—not a death mask but a life one. ♦
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Richard Brody, a film critic, began writing for The New Yorker in 1999. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.”
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