It Takes Time: On Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day

On December 19, 1974, writer Linda Rosenkranz opened the door of her New York flat to photographer and pal Peter Hujar. Rosenkranz, who’d grown up in the Bronx and bolted to Manhattan to work for the Parke-Bernet auction house after her studies, was by then a longtime habitué of the city’s art scene, and Hujar one of several acquaintances she’d recruited for a new book project. The premise? To record artists recount their previous day, warts and all—what they did, who they saw, where they went. No detail was deemed superfluous, no digression boring; Rosenkranz wanted complete access not just to Hujar’s routine but his inner worldview—and her friend, talking his way through thick clouds of cigarette smoke, duly complied.

That might account for why large chunks of Ira Sachs’s scorchingly intimate Peter Hujar’s Day unfurl as a kind of therapy session, why the titular man’s exchanges with Rosenkranz do not register as a conversation so much as a torrential confessional. Rosenkranz never completed her series, and through the actual recording of that sprawling tete-à-tete was lost, a full transcript survived and gave birth to a book. Sachs came across it while shooting Passages (2023) in Paris; he cast Ben Whishaw (Hujar) and Rebecca Hall (Rosenkranz) in a chamber play that’s not concerned with replicating that meandering chat—even as the actors never once stray from the text—so much as with filling in the space between their words, conjuring a portrait of an artist trying to make ends meet, and of the city that gave him a refuge and inspiration.

That Peter Hujar’s Day can offer such a vivid snapshot of mid-1970s New York is nothing short of extraordinary, not least because Alex Ashe’s camera, save for a couple of scenes set on Rosenkranz’s rooftop, never leaves her flat. Not that it needs to: so vivid are Hujar’s recollections they turn into photographs of their own, and the film into a much larger elegy of the Village, then festering with all sorts of creatives, misfits, and outcasts. But how you’ll respond to Sachs’s latest won’t depend on your familiarity with that milieu or with the social circles writer and photographer frequented. Steeped in the specifics of its time and place, Peter Hujar’s Day is after something much broader and elemental: the way people occupy their time. “I feel like I don’t do much of anything,” Hujar tells Rosenkranz, though his memories of the previous day suggest the opposite. December 18, 1974 began with a call from Susan Sontag, asking about his latest exhibit and eager to provide words of encouragement; later that morning, a young writer from Vogue showed up at his flat to take some pictures. But the centrepiece was Hujar’s first assignment for the Times, for which he was to photograph literary titan and fellow Village denizen Allen Ginsberg. Hujar’s herculean efforts to get the poet and Beat Generation doyen to pose for him make up the film’s most humorous segments—Ginsberg is described as a kind of suspicious shaman who keeps sitting lotus and chanting at every corner, and only warms up to Hujar after realising the man had never previously worked for the NYT.

Sachs, working with unobtrusive static shots, seems content to just watch and listen to his performers, and invites us to do the same; Peter Hujar’s Day is that rare film that doesn’t treat you as a passive viewer but a privileged eavesdropper. Time’s a slippery thing; though the conversation ostensibly took place in winter, the light, soundscapes, and garments suggest different seasons, while the frequent ellipses make it all but impossible to understand just how long the two have been chatting. But to write off the film as a laundry list of chores would be hopelessly reductive. Whishaw and Hall may never physically leave Rosenkranz’s building, but their inquiry keeps moving and expanding, almost restlessly so, away from a mere exhumation of a bygone era and toward something bigger—something close to Rosenkranz’s original design, in fact: a study of the way people occupy their time.

Hujar’s no ordinary man: as an artist, he must tend to his craft all while wrestling more prosaic worries like money and success. Toward the end, Rosenkranz asks about some of his latest shots. What does Hujar make of them? Is he satisfied with the result? The photographer isn’t exactly sure, but in lieu of an answer he suggests that “it really does take time to get to know [one’s work].” No sooner do the words float skyward than Hujar shrugs them off as corny. But if there’s any line that speaks to Sachs’s project, this might be it. Peter Hujar’s Day may never show its titular protagonist at work, yet it stands as a perceptive reflection on what it takes to make art: all the compromises, efforts, courage, and the sheer time one must devote to that sacrosanct pursuit. It’s a small wonder that Whishaw and Hall’s conversation exudes such effortlessness; a much bigger one to see Sachs’s film transcend its locale and premise to become a monument to everyone who’s ever tried to create.

Leonardo Goi

© FIPRESCI 2025