Peter Hujar was a brilliant photographer and stylish gay man of the 1970s and 80s, associated with Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe and part of a hip New York coterie of artists and intellectuals. In 1974, he took part in a kind of documentary nonfiction project undertaken by author Linda Rosenkrantz, in which he simply came to her apartment and recounted into a tape machine everything that happened to him on a certain day.
The tape is lost, but the typescript survived, published three years ago as Peter Hujar’s Day and now filmed by director Ira Sachs as a verbatim-cinema chamber piece entirely within Rosenkrantz’s apartment, sometimes in different rooms or pensively up on the roof looking out at the skyline, shot to make it look like it was filmed on 16mm at the time, with ungainly cuts, and scratches on the print.
