By and large, film is a very accessible artform. Most of the time, I can just wheel into a cinema, watch a film, and get what it is about. I can understand the story the audience is being told. However, this wasn’t the case yesterday. John said he was going to watch a film at the Barbican, and once again invited me along. The film he intended to watch was called Peter Hujar’s Day. I’d never heard of it, but as usual try to be open to such opportunities.

We got into the screening room slightly late (my fault), but what I found myself watching was very odd indeed. It wasn’t a conventional film at all: it was just two people, a man and a woman, talking. They spoke and spoke, mostly about his apparent career as a photographer. Nothing else happened; there was no other action or any kind of establishing shots. While I recognised a few of the names the guy mentioned such as Susan Sontag, pretty soon I felt my mind wandering. To be honest when the film ended, I was baffled what I had just been watching.

In this case, however, context is all. When we got home John explained it to me: the film is essentially a dramatisation/visualisation of audiorecordings made in 1975 by Linda Rosenkrantz of her conversations with photographer Peter Hujar. The recordings tell of his interactions with all kinds of famous New York artists, such as Andy Warhol. They essentially give us a glimpse of the vibrant artistic landscape of New York fifty years ago. Being told that instantly put what I had just seen in a fresh light: it wasn’t just a piece of dull, pretentious fiction I’d assumed it to be, but an interesting fragment of reality and art history. Audio transposed into the visual. As soon as I was told that, I kicked myself for being such a luddite, and now feel the need to find out more.