Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day

Shot “austerely but evocatively” on 16 mm by Alex Ashe and running just seventy-six minutes, Peter Hujar’s Day “revels in its spareness, its warm simplicity,” writes Ebiri. “It starts off as an elevation of the quotidian but transforms into something sadder and more reflective . . . So, no, the film is maybe not a doodle. There’s too much craft, too much care here for that. But it is a masterpiece.”

Ben Whishaw stars as the renowned photographer, and Rebecca Hall plays writer Linda Rosenkrantz, who had recorded conversations between herself and two friends about art, sex, and whatever else came to mind and shaped the transcripts into a book, Talk, published in 1968. NYRB Classics reissued Talk in 2015 with an introduction by Stephen Koch, the novelist and historian Hujar named as the executive of his artistic estate shortly before he died at the age of fifty-three from AIDS-related complications in 1987.

Koch now oversees the Peter Hujar Archive and has worked closely with curators on two landmark exhibitions, one at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York in 2018 and one on view right now at Raven Row in London through April 6. Writing about the New York show for 4Columns, Ed Halter noted that “Hujar has often been compared to Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, two more famous photographers whose careers bookended Hujar’s own, and with whom he felt a bitter rivalry . . . One might also place Hujar somewhere between photographers James Van Der Zee and Nan Goldin, both precise documenters of their Manhattan social worlds, marrying Van Der Zee’s studio compositions to Goldin’s bohemian immediacy.”

In the 1970s, Rosenkrantz began asking her artist friends to spend one day taking meticulous notes on everything they saw, did, heard, or said. Hujar obliged, and on December 19, 1974, he met Rosenkrantz in her East Village apartment to describe to her in detail all that had happened the day before. The recording of that full report was lost, but a transcript was discovered in 2019, published in 2022, and now serves as the backbone of Sachs’s screenplay.

“Sachs has been a distinctive observer of New York life in movies like Keep the Lights On, Love is Strange, and Little Men,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “But Peter Hujar’s Day is closer to docufiction than anything he’s done since his striking 1996 feature debut, The Delta, a study of gay desire as candid as it is dreamy. The new film is also one of the most descriptive evocations of the 1970s downtown art scene I’ve encountered since Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids.”

“Step into the film’s excavation of a lost world filled with intellectuals and downtown scenesters and loitering Beat legends and art lovers and ex-lovers,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Fear. As David D’Arcy points out in the Art Newspaper, Hujar at the time was “scraping by on freelance assignments.”

The New York Times sent him to shoot a portrait of Allen Ginsberg, and the two did not hit it off, at least at first. Ginsberg “sits down in the lotus position, very Buddha, right in the doorway, and he starts to chant,” Hujar says. “I can’t interrupt God. I can’t say, ‘Can you please stop that.’” By the end of the session, though, Ginsberg was offering tips on how to win over William S. Burroughs, his next assignment.

Peter Hujar’s Day is “an intimate encapsulation of a queer artist’s life from a bygone era of creative vibrancy,” writes Kent M. Wilhelm for the Film Stage, and throughout, the names keep dropping. The phone rings, Hujar tells Rosenkrantz, and it’s Susan Sontag, who would in another year or two write the introduction to Portraits in Life and Death, the only collection of his photographs that Hujar would see published in his lifetime. Reviewing the new edition last fall for 4Columns, Mark Dery noted that the New York that it captures is “a utopian dystopia; a rotting necropolis alive with underground hustle and bustle (mostly hustle).”

Whishaw and Sachs first worked together on Passages (2023), and Sachs tells Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay that they’re planning to shoot a third film together this summer. In Peter Hujar’s Day, “Whishaw is extraordinary,” writes Macaulay. While “reciting the quotidian events of these hours, through his delivery he also conjures moments of poetry, philosophy, and reflection. And then there’s Rebecca Hall. Great actors are often judged not by their ability to orate a stirring monologue but by their ability to sensitively listen on screen. As Rosenkrantz, Hall’s page count is much smaller than Whishaw’s, but she makes her artist character a compelling equal.”