The movie
Peter Hujar’s Day
A re-enactment of an intimate conversation in 1974 between artist Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz, reflecting on a day in Hujar’s life as a central figure in downtown New York’s cultural scene.
Description
A smoky afternoon in 1974. Photographer Peter Hujar is one of the most important figures in New York’s art scene. For a literary project, writer Linda Rosenkrantz asks him to describe the previous 24 hours of his life in detail. Hujar talks about life in a city where everyone wants to make art but no one has any money; about an encounter with Allen Ginsberg; about Susan Sontag’s literary merits compared with Fran Lebowitz; or simply about his dinner and cheap cigarettes. The two talk late into the night, as only true friends can: honestly, intimately, with humour and affection.
Peter Hujar’s Day captures a day in the life of the celebrated and distinctive photographer Peter Hujar (1934–1987). Hujar’s work is regarded as one of the most important documentations of New York’s artistic and queer communities in the 1970s and ’80s. Rosenkrantz’s art project never came to fruition, but in 2019 a transcript of her conversation with Hujar was rediscovered. Director Ira Sachs (Passages, Love Is Strange) brings their conversation to the screen as a tribute to the photographer, who died far too young, but also as a celebration of friendship, creativity, and a New York that now exists only in traces.
His fascinating portrait of an artist and his era, brilliantly brought to life by Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, received widespread international acclaim and travelled to numerous film festivals.
