Peter Hujar was a brilliant photographer and stylish gay man of the 1970s and 80s, associated with Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe and part of a hip New York coterie of artists and intellectuals. In 1974, he took part in a kind of documentary nonfiction project undertaken by author Linda Rosenkrantz, in which he simply came to her apartment and recounted into a tape machine everything that happened to him on a certain day.
The tape is lost, but the typescript survived, published three years ago as Peter Hujar’s Day and now filmed by director Ira Sachs as a verbatim-cinema chamber piece entirely within Rosenkrantz’s apartment, sometimes in different rooms or pensively up on the roof looking out at the skyline, shot to make it look like it was filmed on 16mm at the time, with ungainly cuts, and scratches on the print.
Rebecca Hall plays Rosenkrantz, asking questions and listening with a continuous air of alert, slightly quizzical and sympathetic amusement. Ben Whishaw is Hujar himself, telling her about a day which he considered quite boring, but was (he now realises) crowded with incident: worrying about money, worrying about health, worrying about lack of sleep, going to Allen Ginsberg to photograph him for the New York Times – a rather surreal encounter – coming back, having a Chinese meal with someone and finishing the day by playing Bach on the harpsichord.
Whishaw is conscientiously lowkey and focused, maintaining a realist, matter-of-fact consistency of pace and tone, and only occasionally and subtly suggesting his own emotional reaction to what he is saying. It’s very different from how it might be written as a fictional dramatic monologue – there are no phases of tears, or laughter, or sudden quiet-voiced moments of self-knowledge. Sachs leaves it up to us to edit the stream of consciousness and to isolate the Leopold Bloom moments of importance.
When Hujar went to Ginsberg, the poet disconcerted the photographer by chanting in the middle of the shoot and suggesting that Hujar perform oral sex on his next scheduled subject: William Burroughs. If all this was insufferable, Hujar doesn’t say so. It is another reminder of how hugely famous and therefore indulged Ginsberg was. Hujar drops a fair few names in the course of this piece, and one of the least important (he implies) is his journalist friend Fran Lebowitz, who he thinks could maybe write an introduction to his next published collection of photos, though naturally he would prefer Susan Sontag. “I’ve always had a star thing …” he sheepishly confesses. What would Hujar and Rosenkrantz say if you could time-travel back to 1974 and explain that in 50 years’ time Lebowitz would be more famous than any of them?
His chronic tiredness is attributed by Rosenkrantz to poor diet. How many vegetables does he eat? Not many, Hujar concedes with a shrug. He smokes so many cigarettes he has a permanent nicotine hangover. He has no one in his life to look after him. Perhaps he is lonely, but not necessarily.
He’s also getting longsighted. Rosenkrantz agrees – she has bursitis and they both thought that these old-people things could never happen to them. On the subject of having to stand back to look at something, Hujar regales Rosenkrantz with the story of photographer Maurice Hogenboom, who was on a shoot in Brazil, stood back to look at something, fell off a cliff and died. Perhaps the most important moment comes with an epiphany of sorts, as Hujar reveals that he has only recently grasped – perhaps at this very moment – that you need time to be a photographer, or any sort of artist: time to think, time to work, time to stand and stare. Maybe this real-time transcription of his day has disclosed this to him.
And what is the point of this film? Perhaps it is inevitably going to be of limited interest, and as intelligent as the two performances are, neither Whishaw nor Hall is tested very much. But it is an intriguing experiment in recovering the moment-by-moment reality of a lost time and place.
