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  • 4 months ago
Ira Sachs’s new film, Peter Hujar’s Day, stars Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in a richly cinematic rendering of a conversation recorded in 1974 between photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz. Their talk that day focused on a single 24 hours in the life of Hujar, the brilliant and famously uncompromising artist who was one of the most important figures in downtown New York’s legendary cultural scene of the 70s and 80s. Set entirely in Linda’s Manhattan apartment, the film freely and imaginatively recreates that long-ago afternoon and the wonderfully discursive exchange between these two singular individuals. As the photographer vividly describes interactions with leading cultural figures of the day, including Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag, as well the challenges of living on limited financial resources in 70s New York, Peter Hujar’s Day transforms unexpectedly into a Bloomsday-like rumination on both an artist’s life and time itself.
Transcript
00:01I stay in bed till 11.45 and then I put my clothes on.
00:06I thought you hadn't taken them off.
00:09Oh, I guess I didn't. I just lied.
00:17And I go downstairs to buy cigarettes and I break a $10 bill because the cigarettes are 56 cents.
00:23God damn.
00:25And I say, is Allen Ginsberg there? And he says, who's calling?
00:31And I say, it's Peter Hujar. I'm supposed to photograph you. The Times.
00:39I get my camera stuff together.
00:41I had a flash that there was something sort of bohemian poet about it.
00:44And I'd be much snazzier in my red ski jacket.
00:46Oh, good choice, yes.
00:47I just think it's more like Lower East Side.
00:50I photographed Ginsberg and he sits down in the lotus position looking very Buddha,
00:58right in the doorway and he starts to chant.
01:00And I really think, well, I can't interrupt God.
01:07But I realized that to do good portraits,
01:09I have to, like, have the time to really look at it, really see what I'm doing.
01:13Sometimes I just stand and stare at it and it's even rather pleasurable.
01:18I often have a feeling that in my day nothing much happens, that I've wasted it.
01:25Well, now you know.
01:26I've wasted another day.
01:32That's why I'm doing this, actually.
01:34To find out how people fill up their days.
01:44That's what happened. That's the way it happened.
01:46What happened was all about I once had
01:47I was just stopped about
01:47but that's what happened psychologically.
01:48That's what happened.
01:49It was very sophisticated.
01:51I was c harsh and becoming a wonderful person.
01:54So I never felt sad about it.
01:57Everybody knew about me.
01:59I suck what happened.
02:00I'm afraid I needed to do anything going on the curb
02:05on my face.
02:07I think I kind of like this girl I got to the back again on my pec.
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