2025 in the Rearview: on Personal Freedoms

I have a personal tendency to group things together, to find commonalities between things that are otherwise unrelated. I know this is not unique to me alone; it’s a bedrock human character to find (or build) order among chaos. Throughout 2025 there has emerged among the films I’ve seen and the books I’ve read a common thread that somehow became intertwined with the personal, emotional journey I found myself experiencing. 

These works include the films Peter Hujar’s Day, My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow, Nouvelle Vague, and Cover-Up, and the books To Anyone who Ever Asks: the Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse, and Goat Song. These are all, to me, works that seek to explore the sheer willpower and determination possessed by creative individuals to embody their personal freedom and work to push that freedom outwards in the creation of works of art, or to rebel against the political, economic, and social structures that threaten those same individual freedoms, and in many cases, democracy as a concept.

What unites these works is a focus on the power of the individual. In Cover-Up and My Undesirable Friends, this manifests itself within the context of the political. In Cover-Up, the journalist Seymour Hersh speaks about the way he forced stories into existence; exposing war crimes committed by the U.S. military in Vietnam happened because he was adamant that the truth had to be told. In a similar vein, the many journalists that are the focus of My Undesirable Friends create information infrastructures to dispense crucial facts about the acts of a hostile government that rejects personal freedoms and labels the journalists, because of this, as “foreign agents” or “undesirables” and as threats against Russia.

100 years ago, Konstantin Vaginov wrote Goat Song about his generation’s struggle to adapt their creative lives to the reality of Russian society after the Bolshevik revolution. Throughout the book, the characters devote their time to creative pursuits as the country around them loses interest in them, in art as a whole. Their lives subsequently become more and more difficult to maintain; the inability to adapt to the fascist takeover of Russia ruined them. That Goat Song at all exists today is testament to Vaginov’s own willpower. Through reading the novel in 2025, I can open a portal to discover the reality of Russia’s transition in the interwar period and link it directly to the efforts of Julia Loktev and her friends to document the current Putin regime. For both groups, there’s a focus on creative expression, on writing, on the personal freedoms previously afforded that are then lost because of fascist governments. Vaginov died at 34. Loktev and her friends were forced to leave Russia.

This same power of the human spirit to create is evidenced in two portraits of artists released this year: Nouvelle Vague and Peter Hujar’s Day. With Nouvelle Vague, Linklater depicts Godard as an obstinate genius, molding his debut film shoot to his will. He’s shown repeatedly bucking conventions of the French film industry, tackling his producer in a restaurant, or shooting for only 2 hours a day. We know he’s successful–Breathless is regarded as a revolutionary landmark of world cinema. Within Peter Hujar’s Day, Sachs depicts a different kind of artist in process: one that never broke through in the way they wanted. In a dual portrait of photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz, Sachs shows the full process of a writer in action. The film follows the minutiae of a day Peter Hujar may or may not have lived, but the conversation is told through Linda’s point of view, and is done at her direction. The entire concept of Hujar relaying the details of his day originates from her idea for a book. As she watches him and leads the interview, we see the work of an artist in process–it’s ostensibly a film about the act of writing. That her book is never fully finished or published in its original conception is as important to the film as the truth that Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg are far more well known than Hujar or Rosenkrantz. Despite this lack of fame, it’s the sheer beauty of their shared artistic creation that moves me. The success is not the point: the act of creating is. 

That is just as true to the life and works of multi-hyphenate musician Connie Converse. Despite years of efforts and tons of creative output, Converse never succeeds in her endeavors, in a conventional sense, or, rather, in an economic one. Her music is never recorded in a traditional sense; her novel is never published; her opera never performed. This lack of success is potentially what led her to forcing her own disappearance, though we can never know what crossed her mind; but for decades she persisted in creating because she contained that fire, because she had to do it. Biographer Howard Fishman was clearly drawn to this aspect of her character. His obsession with her creative work is a testament to the impact art can have.

That I found or came to each of these works this year is no coincidence to me. To have any desire to create can lead the desirer to egoism: I saw pieces of myself in each of the subjects, in ways that both inspired and humbled me. These works, in part, are the impetus for this collection I’m curating. To force these creations into being; in the sense that being perceived is the origin of life of a piece of writing, or a photograph, or a selection of video clips. To document that they were written, and that I was here doing it. There is professional success to be found in these portraits, and there is certainly artistic success, and there is also the unfortunate reality that for many artists, their work is not appreciated until they are gone. Certainly these act as a testament to the power of human creativity, to the beauty of the human spirit, and to the impact single individuals can have on others and on the world. Though Converse’s music wasn’t released publicly until 2009, her family and friends could remember the lyrics despite not hearing them for decades. Vaginov shared his writing with his friends, as depicted throughout Goat Song. Peter and Linda’s transcripted conversation was found in his records in 2019–45 years after the conversation was held. I find it inspiring, all of it, even the failures and the difficulties. Even just to see myself with those eyes: not as a failure, but an individual, somebody so brimming with fire it has no choice but to spill out.