The essence of the counterculture, encapsulated in a 1974 conversation

It is quite possible that this year we will not see any film as enamored with the power of words as this one. A Day with Peter Hujar It recreates the conversations this photographer had with Linda Rosenkrantz over the course of a single day in 1974. Rosenkrantz's idea was for this intense conversation to be part of a collection of interviews chronicling 24 hours in the lives of different artists in 1970s New York. But despite being recorded, the encounter with Hujar took a long time to be published: it wasn't released as a book until 2021.

Peter Hujar He was more than just a photographer known for his famous, intense black and white portraits (Orgasmic manFor example, everyone has seen it: it's the cover of best-sellerSo little life(by Hanya Yanagihara). He was the graphic documentarian, along with his friend Robert Mapplethorpe, of the New York art and underground scene of the 70s and 80s. In his images there is a gaze queer And a desire to capture the beauty of urban life on the margins was also present, as can be seen in the film, in his thinking. He was a freethinking intellectual who primarily expressed himself through images, but when he articulated his discourse with words, he also refined his thinking.

Biopic which is not biopic, A Day with Peter Hujar It includes a handful of reflections and claims about difference and counterculture that resonate in our algorithmic reality today. Spoken by a vulnerable, wise, magnetic, and highly motivated Ben Whishaw (his passion led Ira Sachs to decide to make a feature film rather than a short), Hujar's words are illuminating; ideas articulated from artistic radicalism have been touching the very core of our time's ills for over 50 years far more than current discourses.