In 1974 New York writer Linda Rosenkrantz interviewed the renowned photographer Peter Hujar about his day. The conversation was intended to be a book in which interviewees describe in detail exactly how they spent the day before the interview.
No detail was to be spared. But because Hujar’s day was spent dealing with such luminaries as Susan Sontag and beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg whom he photographed for The New York Times, Hujar’s description of his day is also like a Who’s Who of the time.
Rosenkrantz’s idea never made it into print but in 2021 a transcript of her interview with Hujar was published as a 36-page book. Now the Jewish, gay and fearless independent film-maker Ira Sachs has adapted that text into a captivating film in which Ben Whishaw’s Hujar and Rebecca Hall’s Rosenkrantz loll around Hujar’s New York apartment recreating the conversation.
The result is like a time capsule. Shot with natural light and on grainy 16mm on a 4:3 aspect ratio, the original format used for television, the authentic result feels as if it could have been discovered in an attic, much like Rosencrantz’s text was.
Whishaw and Hall deliver performances of quietly astounding naturalism as they breath life into the text of the transcription. You ache to see some of the photographs that Hujar describes taking in the film.
Yet dialogue is brimful of gossip and friendship, and in the passages where Hujar describes his working methods the film becomes a hymn to the wet process of photography that the digital age has killed.
Peter Hujar’s Day
Cert 12a
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