PETER HUJAR'S DAY ***
Ira Sachs2025
IDEA: On December 19, 1974, journalist Linda Rosenkrantz visits photographer Peter Hujar in his Manhattan apartment and has him recount his previous day in minute detail for an audio recording.
BLURB: As in many a postmodern work, Peter Hujar’s Day is most fascinating on the conceptual level, in this case as an experiment in archival reconstruction. Sachs’s premise is founded on multiple levels of translation and mediation across media and time: from the spoken words of Hujar and Rosenkrantz as recorded by audiotape in 1974 to a written transcript of the conversation, to a published book of that transcript and then to screenplay, and finally to a visual reenactment in which the words are embodied by actors in a physical space filled with ambient sounds and music. There is at once a documentary consciousness elicited here — the words we’re hearing are the actual words Hujar spoke over 50 years ago — and a pointed artifice, which Sachs underscores through meta-cinematic devices such as camera light leaks that punctuate scenes and, at one point, a sound crew and boom mic in the frame. One could likely just listen to Peter Hujar’s Day, as one could to Derek Jarman’s Blue, and be rewarded by Ben Whishaw’s and Rebecca Hall’s loving embodiments of their subjects’ voices, the way their timbres and cadences resurrect something of the lived experiences of the artists they play. But this is a film, after all, and Sachs fashions lissome images that reveal varied ways of depicting two people in what is essentially one small area. There is a casual dynamism here, from adjustments in blocking, shot scale and length, and movement to the change of light as the day wears on, sun projected on faces and walls in warm 16 mm. The formalism, at times, draws more attention than the words, but they are all of a piece in this wispy but striking film in which the technologies of memory are the very grounds of memory itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment