Peter Hujar's Day

 We do not remember days, we remember moments. Cesare Pavese 

There is a silent question running through Sachs's entire film, and it seems to me its true theoretical wager: what remains of a day once it is uttered? Not when it is interpreted, judged or transfigured into exemplary narrative, but when it is given back in its chronological nakedness, faithful to the order in which things simply occurred. Peter Hujar's Day is a phenomenological experiment disguised as an afternoon among friends. Heidegger would have recognized here, without difficulty, the dimension of Alltäglichkeit, that average everydayness in which Dasein normally forgets itself; but Sachs performs the opposite gesture from the philosopher, and perhaps a more radical one: he does not denounce the inauthenticity of idle talk, he consecrates it. He shows that precisely in the minute inventory of the day, in the seemingly insignificant sequence of gestures, there can occur — by friction, by accumulation, by faith in listening — a revelation of being. 

The device is of an almost ascetic simplicity. Two bodies, one room, a machine that records. No reconstruction, no flashback, no concession to the picturesque of 1970s New York, which nonetheless looms outside the window like a ready-made myth. Sachs refuses to aestheticize the era, to turn Hujar into a posthumous icon, to exploit the aura of a scene — that of the pre-AIDS East Village — which cinema has consumed to the point of cliché. His formal ethic is one of subtraction: what we see is only a man speaking about the day before to a woman who listens to him with total attention. And it is here that the film strikes its highest note. Linda's listening is not instrumental, not journalistic, not seduction nor analysis. It is, in an almost Levinasian sense, a making of space for the face of the other so that they may say what they are without having to justify themselves. The room becomes, in this way, a small epoché: a parenthesis in the flow of History, in which the individual is not yet sign nor legend, but only the one who is passing through their own hours. 

And it is worth noting how, through Whishaw's body, Sachs composes a diptych in antithesis with his previous Passages: there Whishaw was Martin, the other wounded by the "headless enjoyment" of Tomas, a director incapable of completing the direction of his own life; here he is Hujar, the exact reverse of that voracity — the artist who, instead of taking, lets himself be listened to, and turns another's day into the very form of attention. 

Like Linklater's Nouvelle Vague, Sachs's film too is an act of philological piety toward a creative season that the present struggles to imagine: not nostalgia, but the recognition that certain ways of being in the world — and of making art — were possible only within a different order of time. 

Whishaw is prodigious precisely in the measure to which he renounces being prodigious. He does not play Peter Hujar in the biopic sense, he does not construct his myth; he inhabits him for the length of a conversation, lending him his voice with that receptive docility which is the opposite of imitation. Hall, for her part, turns Rosenkrantz into an almost maieutic figure, a presence that does not demand but offers, does not probe but authorizes. What is generated between the two is a form of intimacy with something ancient about it, a philia in the Aristotelian sense, friendship as the place in which the other may at last simply be — without producing, without performing, without proving. In an age, our own, in which every existence is solicited to document itself publicly and to construct itself as a brand, watching two human beings devote an afternoon to recording an ordinary day, with no end other than not to lose it, has the force of a small counter-historical gesture. 

The inevitable question, then, is: why this film, and why now? Sachs has declared that he has no intention of "broadening the audience" for Hujar; it is therefore neither an operation of posthumous canonization nor of affective archaeology. It seems to me, rather, that the director has found in that conversation the matrix of a broader reflection on the condition of the artist — and, ultimately, on the existential condition tout court — in its least spectacular form: art as a way of inhabiting the day, not as a product to be delivered. The New York of 1974 that Hujar describes is a city where no one makes any money, where artists live on loans, on phone calls, on meals shared together, on a subterranean solidarity that does not yet call itself "community" because the word has not yet become jargon. It is a world before capture, before every existence became content. Sachs looks at it, measures its distance from the present, and understands that the true subject of the film is not Hujar but the very possibility of a slow, descriptive, shared time — the possibility of a day worth recounting to someone willing to listen to it in its entirety. 

There is, finally, an almost metaphysical vertigo in this double temporal grafting: we watch, in 2026, two actors who in 2025 embody two people who in 1974 are conversing about 1973 (about the day before, that is to say about an instant already lost in the very instant in which it is being said). Each layer poses the question: where does the day being recounted truly dwell? Does it exist only in the memory of the one who lived it, in the tape that records it, in the pages of the book, in the film that stages it again — or rather in this continuous passing of hands, in this inheritance that from living experience becomes trace and from trace becomes presence once more? Hujar will die of AIDS in 1987, in that biographical and generational catastrophe which runs through the film like an absence not yet named, and for that very reason heartrending. The day recounted in that room is a day no one knew had to be saved, and that was saved almost by chance, almost out of idleness. Sachs returns it to us intact, and in returning it to us he suggests that every life is worthy of this rescue — not because every life is a masterpiece, but because every day, if listened to all the way through, contains the very structure of finite being: waiting, encounter, accident, boredom, desire, sleep. 

In this sense, Peter Hujar's Day is not a film about a photographer. It is a meditation on the poorest and the highest form of love: attention. It is the cinematic demonstration of a thesis that Simone Weil would have endorsed — that the capacity to lend pure listening is an almost miraculous rarity, and that whoever receives it, even for only an hour, is for that hour restored to themselves. The reason that led Sachs to make this film coincides, I believe, with its thesis: in a world that produces images without looking at them and words without listening to them, to film two people doing the opposite — looking at each other and listening to each other — is already, in itself, a political, ethical, and secretly metaphysical act. 

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Susan Sontag