What Three Recent Films Reveal About How We View Poets and Poetry

Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day is described as the definitive artist biopic of this decade.

A biopic is a film that dramatizes the life of a real person, in this case, Peter Hujar, an American photographer known for his black-and-white portraits of artists, drag queens, and downtown New York City figures.

The film focuses on a small slice of Hujar’s life rather than offering a full chronological biography, which is a stylistic choice to highlight the dailiness of a working artist’s life.

Dailiness refers to the routine, mundane aspects of daily existence, emphasizing how creativity and labor unfold in ordinary moments.

Sachs’s approach avoids dramatic arcs or sensationalism, instead presenting a sliver of time that captures the unglamorous yet essential aspects of artistic practice.

The film’s title itself, Peter Hujar’s Day, underscores this focus on a single day, suggesting a snapshot rather than an epic narrative.