Peter Hujar's Day

In Peter Hujar’s Day, a conversation-film, it takes just two minutes for the recorder to be forgotten. The writer Linda Rosenkrantz places it on the glass, activates the mechanism that will capture the voices, and sets the reels spinning. If the metallic microphone peeks in, it does so shyly, skimming the frame, aware that it is superfluous. When the magnetic tape device reappears, it is a mere ornament on the table, alongside the fruit basket, the tea set, and the candlestick. Put simply: the technology is reduced to its insignificance, incapable of interfering with the chatter.

It is not always like this. Recording can distort the privacy of a moment: it imposes an imminent or imagined audience and leaves consequences on statements that would otherwise have been made freely. Consider Weekend (2011), by Andrew Haigh, in which one character complicates a one-night stand: not only does he wake up next to a stranger, but he invites him to recount the courtship and the intercourse, recorder in hand. The partner responds in halting, half-words, in a modest and fragmented speech. But a similar device does not constrain the photographer Peter Hujar, who faithfully reconstructs his last 24 hours at Rosenkrantz’s request. These roles are performed with calibrated sensitivity and a special affection by Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall.

Ira Sachs, director of Love is Strange (2014) and Passages (2023), dramatizes the account based on a transcription by Rosenkrantz (the tape was lost, an intertitle informs us). Meticulously: he does not seem to omit a single detail. The sprouted grain bread that Hujar brought to his mouth. The phone call from an acquaintance, announcing that he was masturbating. The revelation, in the darkroom, of his legendary black-and-white portraits (one of which is now the cover of A Little Life, the controversial novel by Hanya Yanagihara). The card for photographic prints that is almost finished. The corrections he must make to his awkward signature… Could the routine be any different? Cyclical, it induces a monotonous tone, and even speaking with Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg does little to enliven the conversation. It is natural: they were all shoulder to shoulder, merely “artists among artists, in a city where nobody makes money,” Sachs explains.

Yet Peter Hujar’s Day treats this schedule of tasks with hypnotic pleasure. The minutes unfold in direct, uninterrupted speech through the various rooms of an impossibly aesthetic apartment: a delight of colours and angles, levels and craftsmanship. Limited though it may be, Sachs’ movement is measured by the décor and the evening light, by the placement of bodies and the interplay of illumination. There are also a handful of surreal interludes, reminiscent of Pablo Larraín (Spencer, 2021), in a disruptive play on the linearity of dialogue: Whishaw and Hall break the fourth wall to the sound of Mozart, striking poses of pictorial precision.

After all, we are in the company of a figure from New York in the 1970s and 1980s, aren’t we? Every detail of banality matters to us when the subject captivates us. If so, our gaze rhymes with Rosenkrantz’s—or perhaps we actively wish to imitate it. It is hard not to covet the generosity of her expression as she listens to her friend discourse on something as trivial as the Chinese restaurant customer who doodles on a business card with a felt-tip pen. She nags Hujar for not eating enough vegetables; she does not hesitate to remind him that he can be brusque in manner. And, in a rare moment of tenderness that is more physical than tacit, she allows him to rest his head on her lap. Rosenkrantz serves as the happy counterpoint to the intrusive gaze in My Dinner with Andre (1981), that of the waiter suspicious of the onstage chatter. At some point during Louis Malle’s nearly two-hour-long, exquisite and exhausting film, it is certainly tempting for the viewer to identify with him.

Here, the figure to follow is Rosenkrantz: a model of Platonic enchantment. Just as Wally in Andre, the most celebrated conversation-film of all, it is she who embraces the role of interviewer, satisfying her curiosity; the other will be the dominant speaker, though not uninterested in the interlocutor. Yet Sachs diverges from Malle in almost every other respect. He also focuses on intellectuals, but dispenses with intellectual onanism. He rejects meticulous monologues in favour of the ebb-and-flow rhythm of orality; as if to say, chatter—if not gossip—should be shapeless and naturalistic. And in the era of compulsive podcasts and conversations instrumentalised for self-promotion, that is no small gesture.

In Peter Hujar’s Day, the sun sets and the conversation continues, lying down, napes against the wall. Hujar unpacks the rest of the day, filtered through the light from the window: a spotlight on the gentle chatter that never reaches Rosenkrantz. The friend, arms crossed, watches him with a faint smile and lounges in the shadows.