NYFF 63: "Peter Hujar's Day" ponders portraiture

by Cláudio Alves

The subject of many recent retrospectives, republishing projects, biographical and speculative analyses, Peter Hujar was among the queer creatives who, in the second half of the 20th century, helped define what we understand as the New York art scene. A portrait photographer, his oeuvre can be considered in dialogue with that of Mapplethorpe and Wojnarowicz, among others. And like those men, he died young, a victim of the AIDS crisis. Almost thirteen years before that end, Hujar sat down with his friend, Linda Rosenkrantz, and recalled the previous day in detail, allowing himself to be recorded for a work she was developing. Her book was never realized, but in 2019, a typewritten record of Hujar's testimony showed up in the Morgan Library archives.

Director Ira Sachs read the published transcripts while filming Passages, getting the idea to dramatize the material. The result is Peter Hujar's Day, a conversation piece where Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall breathe life into what remains of that long afternoon shared between two portraitists…

Textually, there's minimal transformation between the historical record and the words performed for Sachs' camera. Indeed, there's never a cut to illustrative footage of what Whishaw's describing, keeping the audience with him as he talks, nearly nonstop, for 75 minutes. Hall, in contrast, keeps faithful to Rosenkrantz's role as listener, interjecting very little, guiding the monologue through unobtrusive gestures that seldom interrupt her costar's flowing speech. It's a bit of a test of the audience's patience and the filmmaker's resolve, risking tedium while pulling for an active viewership who'll let their minds project another film onto the screen.

We never see the previous day in Hujar's life, his acrimonious meeting with Allen Ginsberg for a New York Times portrait, the traverse through the city, the dark room work, the insinuation of sex, the sharing of a Chinese takeout for dinner. Yet, we can't avoid seeing them either. Sachs' restraint invites that phenomenon, as do the actors' approaches, which are precise and evocative but hardly showboating. Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason is an admitted part of the film's audiovisual bibliography, but there's little of Jason Holliday's extravagant storytelling in Whishaw's presentation. Peter Hujar's Day is both a one-man show and the repudiation of that very notion.

With that said, I fear my description may suggest a work of Bressonian severity, when that is not the case. Sachs is willing to experiment with the form and even play with it, to the point where the production lives and dies in the tension between the sacrosanctity of the record as it exists and the artist's need to transcend archeological norms through self-expression. The least successful capitulation to mediating styles occurs whenever Mozart's Requiem bursts through the soundtrack, and the odd attempt at a poor pastiche of Hujar's photography. Thankfully, these failed flourishes are few and far between.

A more successful oddity comes in one's sense of time while watching Peter Hujar's Day. Or lack thereof, since, through a combination of costume, light, and cutting, Sachs messes with the very premise of his exercise. This is all supposed to take place within one day, never leaving the domestic interior apart from a few trips up to the rooftop for a smoke. Yet, the day's journey into night curls in on itself, as if pieces of the conversation were stitched together from different threads from different moments. However, Affonso Gonçalves' editing takes incompatible instants and treats them as one. Even the sound mix bleeds them together, creating a filmic deception that doesn't quite feel like one. 

Speaking of sound, the city's constant buzz can be more illuminating than Hujar's words. Entire passages are contaminated by the cacophony outside, sometimes in what's akin to punctuation or an ironic twist. Like when the photographer talks about jacking off and the interruption of a sexual proposition, all while jackhammers sing their pounding song in the background. But even beyond fleshing out a 1970s New York beyond the camera's purview, Eli Cohn's sound design is a thing of beauty, suggesting the texture of audiotape without resorting to a straight sonic pastiche. I'm thinking of dinner between friends, the whisper of a match, the hum of fire flickering at the crown of three lonely candles. 

Alex Ashe's cinematography is almost as elegant, if not a tad more pointed in its mediations. There's the temporal displacement I've already mentioned, but also such lovely things as the play of sunlight through windows, projecting luminous frames and prosceniums onto walls and people. It can be quite the dramatic thing, closing Hujar in a box of gold while keeping his listener in penumbra. For sure, much of Sachs and company's visual quirks come out in the contrast of how the two characters inhabit the frame. Hall's stillness can clash against Whishaw's volatile energy, manifest in their framing.

He'll slip out of a composition, contradicting the camera's plan or, at least, communicating that illusion before fitting back into its design. At a certain point, Hall is left out of focus, observing, literalizing her background presence as a conversational guide and listener but not a discernible participant. The shot only comes into focus when it moves laterally and finds Whishaw, as it was always meant to do. Much later in the monologue cum conversation, another flash of unfocused footage appears, this time of Whishaw in a space that's difficult to recognize but seems outside the domestic confines of the remaining material.

In this gesture, is the director betraying the conceptual backbone underpinning everything else in Peter Hujar's Day? Maybe he's inviting us to ponder the artistic problem of the portrait, seeing as both Hujar and Rosenkrantz were portraitists. He used a still camera as his medium, while she recorded conversations and then put them to paper. Did any of them manage to capture their subjects, really? How does one synthesize another person in the artistic object? Is it even possible to grasp anything beyond a faint impression? And is that impression dishonest or the opposite, earning authenticity in its declared fragmentation?

At its best and most thought-provoking, Peter Hujar's Day appears to posit that recreating such truth is an admittedly impossible project, and in that admission lies the most truthful aspect of the ordeal. Which is to say that Sachs is another participant in this exchange between artists, as is the fate of anyone who reads the original transcript or, really, any form of documented dialogue. The simplicity of his devices paradoxically hides and reveals this underlying friction that runs rampant from start to finish, elevating Peter Hujar's Day above the mere invocation of the past. In that regard, it actually hints at the profundity of Rosenkrantz's methodology.

In fact, though Hujar remains the central subject, I couldn't help but feel drawn to Rosenkrantz as the human embodiment of all the film's formal and conceptual quandaries. Not to belabor the point, but it works similarly to how Shirley Clarke becomes the metafilmic focus of Portrait of Jason when its end peels back the layers of exploitation at hand, whether with intention or not, and nudges the audience into rethinking the documentary as a recording of her gaze rather than her subject. In other words, Sachs accomplishes some of what Stephen Winter tried to pin down in his 2015 Jason and Shirley, but does it with grace and enough reticence to keep you guessing.

It certainly helps that Hall is so fascinating to watch, holding the audience in the palm of her hand whenever the writer becomes a smidge more active. It's as if we feel a subtle redirection of the conversation, a pressing on a spot, deepening or perhaps just torturing a bruise. At the end, Whishaw's tour de force reaches its exhausted conclusion, Hujar slips into more internalized self-reflection while the actor strains to keep sentimentality at bay, eyes receding into shadow. Nevertheless, it's the Mona Lisa smile in Hall's face that feels like the period at the end of this particular text. After all, this might have been Peter Hujar's day, but it lives on as Linda Rosenkrantz's transcript of a conversation she envisioned, suggested into being, and ultimately immortalized.

Peter Hujar's Day is playing in the New York Film Festival's Main Slate. Janus Films will release it theatrically on November 30th.