The Windmill English Movie
6/17/2009
Director
Alexander Olch
Cast Credit
Richard P Rogers - Himself
Bob Balaban Himself
Wallace Shawn Himself
Production Credits
Andrew Fierberg Consulting Producer
David Grubin Co-Producer
Susan Meiselas Producer
Production Companies Credit
SCM Productions Production Company
Distribution Companies Credit
Writer Credit
Alexander Olch
Reviews
Richard P. “Dick” Rogers was a respected filmmaker and film teacher. Following his death in 2001, his former student Alexander Olch began digging through boxes of footage Rogers shot for a long-planned autobiography. Here, we learn about Rogers’ childhood up to just days before his death. While it provides a portrait of Dick Rogers, it is also focuses on his personal quest to create a lasting artistic legacy.
What do you call a documentary composed of elements of somebody else's personal diary film? Homage? Portrait? Assemblage? Case study? After documentary filmmaker Richard P. Rogers struggled vainly for decades to wrap a self-reflexive film about his own dissatisfied upper-class existence, his pic was posthumously completed by friendly elf/ex-student Alexander Olch. Olch utilizes read-aloud entries from reimagined personal journals as structural stepping stones in "The Windmill Movie." Perhaps better entitled "What Price Closure?," pic recounts in excruciating detail its own conception, status and conclusion. Appealing to the cinematic intelligentsia and the self-deprecatingly elitist "Sideways" crowd, narcissistic docu could spark lively discussion.
Denied the tools of a Hollywood dream machine to naturalize the good life, indie film is forced to justify class privilege. Where Wes Anderson invites his audience to share in the absurdity of inherited wealth and Whit Stillman aestheticizes boundless yuppiedom, Rogers agonizes over his upper-crust circumstances.
Rogers shot compulsively around his parents' house in the affluent town of Wainscott in the Hamptons, home of the eponymous windmill which his mother (who was given to throwing out dark hints about inherited madness) apparently believed to be the literal incarnation of her own father.
Shown posing for her son's camera lounging in a lawn chair and sipping a drink while dressed in a mink coat in July -- and later clinging to the framelines, shrunken by cancer -- her ghost hovers over the well-appointed enclave which Rogers associates with summers filled with attractive bathing suit-clad women and dipsomania.
Meanwhile, in the movie-mad Hamptons community, Rogers, armed with his unfinished movie, began to acquire the legendary proportions of a home-grown Orson Welles carting around an uncompleted "The Other Side of the Wind."
Olch includes copious footage of Rogers rationalizing his duplicitous parallel affairs with two women who lived around the corner from each other, one being his lifelong partner and last-minute wife, shutterbug extraordinaire Susan Meiselas (who produced the film).
Detailed minutiae of the physical changes that befall Rogers, from the accidental and mildly heroic loss of three toes to the creeping melanoma that eventually killed him, find equal pride of place.
Olch allows room for "avid epiphanies," clever segues that satisfyingly link moment to moment to supply subtle subtexts: for example, a cut from Rogers' mother's cry "Why didn't you stick to painting?" to a shot of a white sail brushing through multicolored reeds that could have been lifted from Jean Renoir's tribute to his painter father, "Picnic on the Grass."
Conspicuously absent, though, except for a few lovely hot air balloon sequences, is any glimpse of Rogers' award-winning work as a documentarian. In a film by Rogers about himself, such a structuring absence makes sense. In a work by someone else, however, this glaring omission calls the entire enterprise into question.
Of course, calling the project into question is part and parcel with Rogers' modus operandi, and Olch happily joins his mentor in gleefully recording every cinematic dead-end he encounters in compiling the magnum opus. Thus Rogers' early attempts to cast actors in a reconstruction of his bio are extended in Olch's replaying of earlier-seen footage, casting vague look-alike Wallace Shawn in the role of Rogers.
Yet the question posed into the mirror by a nude Rogers training a camera on his reflection, still echoes at pic's end: "The question is always whether there is anything to say. Whether any of this means anything or is just a kind of voyeurism, a kind of auto-eroticism." The jury is still out.
The possibility of the cinematic equivalent of the autobiography has become more and more of a reality over the past few years. While there have long been documentaries in which the filmmaker’s visual and aural presence is a fundamental part of the film’s process of addressing a broader concern (seen most famously in the work of Ross McElwee and Michael Moore; participatory documentaries as theorist Bill Nichols dubs them), the dawn of the 21st century has seen a development in which the individual is the subject and that subject is also the filmmaker. The prime example of the cinematic autobiography is Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, a surreal blend of home movies, avant-garde practices, and home editing software binging. Caouette, who has seemingly been filming himself his entire life, compiled approximately two decades of self-recordings in order to create a hodge-podge autobiographical documentary of his experience growing up with a mentally unbalanced mother. Somewhere between Tarnation and Grizzly Man (in that the subject’s death prohibited the film’s post-production from being truly autobiographical) is The Windmill Movie, the chronicling of filmmaker and Harvard film professor Richard P. Rogers.Rogers spent the majority of his life trying to make a film about himself. Starting and stopping, adjusting and readjusting, he continually tinkered with what design the film should take and what sort of threads should hold it together. At certain points he even cast actors to play himself in reenactments. Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride, Clueless), a real life friend of Rogers, appears in The Windmill Movie on occasion, reciting some of the dialogue that we’ve previously seen addressed to the camera by Rogers himself. These moments of juxtaposition are fascinating because they underline the inability of the actor’s performance to capture the pathos of the real life Rogers. Unable to ever decide on a cohesive style for the film before succumbing to cancer in 2001, Rogers left behind an assortment of film reels and diaries. After his death, Rogers’ wife, photographer Susan Meiselas, contacted one of his former film students, Alexander Olch, to sort through the personal media database and assemble what would eventually become The Windmill Movie. By using Rogers’ film extracts and journal entries as a primer, Olch edits Rogers’ existing material alongside reenactments and postulations. Seeing the 80-minute final product, it is occasionally difficult to tell where Rogers leaves off and Olch begins—a quality that is ultimately more of a nuisance than an intrigue.Two major insecurities plague Rogers throughout the film and assumedly throughout his life: a self-perceived inferiority as a filmmaker and a struggle to accept his privileged upbringing. “Is it unfair to criticize yourself for not being Spielberg?” is a question Rogers voices twice in the film. Despite holding a position as director of the Film Study Center at Harvard and directing a number of television documentaries, Rogers was always self-critical about his filmmaking talent. “You don’t like the way I shoot, do you?” he repeatedly needles Susan during a striking moment when it is clear that he is looking for someone to confirm his deep-seated fear of failure rather than to receive constructive criticism. The New York Film Festival screening of The Windmill Movie was preceded by Quarry, an experimental short that Rogers made during his senior year at Harvard. In its medley of teenagers frolicking, swimming, sunbathing, and cliff-jumping in a town quarry, the short uses non-synchronous voiceover to spout surface-level concerns about topics like factory wages and Vietnam in competition with a free flowing pop score that implies Kenneth Anger as a direct influence. Despite being well-shot (capturing the cliff jumps in majestic glory and sumptuously contemplating the beauty of raindrops on water), this is no lost masterpiece. The combined elements of the twelve-minute film are not engaging enough to affect much effort in sorting out their connections amongst their disparity. It does however make for an interesting precursor to The Windmill Movie and serves to better understand Rogers’ sensibility and dissatisfaction toward his own filmmaking.The other major concern is social class. Early in the film, he states his frustration at being privileged, white, and rich. He follows this with the acknowledgement that he can’t expect sympathy for such a complaint: “it must be infuriating to hear someone complain in the Hamptons.” Yet his concerns are acute and his oscillation between embracing his privilege and being confined by it is one of the film’s most compelling aspects. The title of the film is a reference to the Wainscott Windmill, an antiquated symbol of affluence found in his hometown in East Hampton. In a wonderfully illuminating moment, Rogers reflects on the pride he feels for having a house in Wainscott but also the reality of not having earned it. This is something he seems to feel about his life’s achievements in general: he’s inherited a lot but he hasn’t earned much on his own.
Rogers’ concern about getting an audience to invest in someone whose major gripe is that he is too privileged is unfounded, at least for the first hour. By the end, the pervading sense of solipsism does become wearying but this is due not to the subject of Rogers but to the increased awareness of Olch’s hand as filmmaker rather than as curator of Rogers’ legacy. Olch initially uses Rogers’ audio recordings and on-camera confessionals to narrate the film but when the stock material runs out, Olch begins narrating the film himself by reading extracts from Rogers’ diary. For the last portion of the film, while Rogers was undergoing cancer treatment and unable to write in his diary, Olch takes to emulating Rogers’ writing style, a practice which results in a momentary illusion of identity but an ultimate inability to replicate Rogers’ engaging personality. More to the problem is that Olch’s bland voiceover resembles a disengaged actor delivering a routine audio book recording. For all the mental wrestling that Rogers did over whether or not to cast an actor to play himself, it’s hard not to wonder if Olch ever considered a similar route—and whether he would have benefitted from it. This points to a central problem of the film in that Olch seems uncertain about what degree of involvement he wants to have in the text. As it is, he wavers somewhere between participant and ghostwriter.This criticism is not designed to charge Olch of failing to meet unachievable expectations, like making the material as emotional for the audience member as it is for those involved or recording narration as mellifluous as Werner Herzog’s. Rather it is to attest to the power of the mode of the cinematic autobiography itself. Just as we see Shawn unable to ape Rogers as a physical presence, we also witness Olch’s inability to serve as a spiritual surrogate for the subject. But this is not meant to disparage Olch’s work entirely. The elegiac tone and pacing of the first half of The Windmill Movie is remarkable in its achievement of the uncanny sensation of being inside the fragmented memories of the recently deceased: soaking in nostalgia, grappling with squandered potential, lamenting missed opportunity, relishing a loved one.
Reviews
Richard P. “Dick” Rogers was a respected filmmaker and film teacher. Following his death in 2001, his former student Alexander Olch began digging through boxes of footage Rogers shot for a long-planned autobiography. Here, we learn about Rogers’ childhood up to just days before his death. While it provides a portrait of Dick Rogers, it is also focuses on his personal quest to create a lasting artistic legacy.
What do you call a documentary composed of elements of somebody else's personal diary film? Homage? Portrait? Assemblage? Case study? After documentary filmmaker Richard P. Rogers struggled vainly for decades to wrap a self-reflexive film about his own dissatisfied upper-class existence, his pic was posthumously completed by friendly elf/ex-student Alexander Olch. Olch utilizes read-aloud entries from reimagined personal journals as structural stepping stones in "The Windmill Movie." Perhaps better entitled "What Price Closure?," pic recounts in excruciating detail its own conception, status and conclusion. Appealing to the cinematic intelligentsia and the self-deprecatingly elitist "Sideways" crowd, narcissistic docu could spark lively discussion.
Denied the tools of a Hollywood dream machine to naturalize the good life, indie film is forced to justify class privilege. Where Wes Anderson invites his audience to share in the absurdity of inherited wealth and Whit Stillman aestheticizes boundless yuppiedom, Rogers agonizes over his upper-crust circumstances.
Rogers shot compulsively around his parents' house in the affluent town of Wainscott in the Hamptons, home of the eponymous windmill which his mother (who was given to throwing out dark hints about inherited madness) apparently believed to be the literal incarnation of her own father.
Shown posing for her son's camera lounging in a lawn chair and sipping a drink while dressed in a mink coat in July -- and later clinging to the framelines, shrunken by cancer -- her ghost hovers over the well-appointed enclave which Rogers associates with summers filled with attractive bathing suit-clad women and dipsomania.
Meanwhile, in the movie-mad Hamptons community, Rogers, armed with his unfinished movie, began to acquire the legendary proportions of a home-grown Orson Welles carting around an uncompleted "The Other Side of the Wind."
Olch includes copious footage of Rogers rationalizing his duplicitous parallel affairs with two women who lived around the corner from each other, one being his lifelong partner and last-minute wife, shutterbug extraordinaire Susan Meiselas (who produced the film).
Detailed minutiae of the physical changes that befall Rogers, from the accidental and mildly heroic loss of three toes to the creeping melanoma that eventually killed him, find equal pride of place.
Olch allows room for "avid epiphanies," clever segues that satisfyingly link moment to moment to supply subtle subtexts: for example, a cut from Rogers' mother's cry "Why didn't you stick to painting?" to a shot of a white sail brushing through multicolored reeds that could have been lifted from Jean Renoir's tribute to his painter father, "Picnic on the Grass."
Conspicuously absent, though, except for a few lovely hot air balloon sequences, is any glimpse of Rogers' award-winning work as a documentarian. In a film by Rogers about himself, such a structuring absence makes sense. In a work by someone else, however, this glaring omission calls the entire enterprise into question.
Of course, calling the project into question is part and parcel with Rogers' modus operandi, and Olch happily joins his mentor in gleefully recording every cinematic dead-end he encounters in compiling the magnum opus. Thus Rogers' early attempts to cast actors in a reconstruction of his bio are extended in Olch's replaying of earlier-seen footage, casting vague look-alike Wallace Shawn in the role of Rogers.
Yet the question posed into the mirror by a nude Rogers training a camera on his reflection, still echoes at pic's end: "The question is always whether there is anything to say. Whether any of this means anything or is just a kind of voyeurism, a kind of auto-eroticism." The jury is still out.
The possibility of the cinematic equivalent of the autobiography has become more and more of a reality over the past few years. While there have long been documentaries in which the filmmaker’s visual and aural presence is a fundamental part of the film’s process of addressing a broader concern (seen most famously in the work of Ross McElwee and Michael Moore; participatory documentaries as theorist Bill Nichols dubs them), the dawn of the 21st century has seen a development in which the individual is the subject and that subject is also the filmmaker. The prime example of the cinematic autobiography is Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, a surreal blend of home movies, avant-garde practices, and home editing software binging. Caouette, who has seemingly been filming himself his entire life, compiled approximately two decades of self-recordings in order to create a hodge-podge autobiographical documentary of his experience growing up with a mentally unbalanced mother. Somewhere between Tarnation and Grizzly Man (in that the subject’s death prohibited the film’s post-production from being truly autobiographical) is The Windmill Movie, the chronicling of filmmaker and Harvard film professor Richard P. Rogers.Rogers spent the majority of his life trying to make a film about himself. Starting and stopping, adjusting and readjusting, he continually tinkered with what design the film should take and what sort of threads should hold it together. At certain points he even cast actors to play himself in reenactments. Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride, Clueless), a real life friend of Rogers, appears in The Windmill Movie on occasion, reciting some of the dialogue that we’ve previously seen addressed to the camera by Rogers himself. These moments of juxtaposition are fascinating because they underline the inability of the actor’s performance to capture the pathos of the real life Rogers. Unable to ever decide on a cohesive style for the film before succumbing to cancer in 2001, Rogers left behind an assortment of film reels and diaries. After his death, Rogers’ wife, photographer Susan Meiselas, contacted one of his former film students, Alexander Olch, to sort through the personal media database and assemble what would eventually become The Windmill Movie. By using Rogers’ film extracts and journal entries as a primer, Olch edits Rogers’ existing material alongside reenactments and postulations. Seeing the 80-minute final product, it is occasionally difficult to tell where Rogers leaves off and Olch begins—a quality that is ultimately more of a nuisance than an intrigue.Two major insecurities plague Rogers throughout the film and assumedly throughout his life: a self-perceived inferiority as a filmmaker and a struggle to accept his privileged upbringing. “Is it unfair to criticize yourself for not being Spielberg?” is a question Rogers voices twice in the film. Despite holding a position as director of the Film Study Center at Harvard and directing a number of television documentaries, Rogers was always self-critical about his filmmaking talent. “You don’t like the way I shoot, do you?” he repeatedly needles Susan during a striking moment when it is clear that he is looking for someone to confirm his deep-seated fear of failure rather than to receive constructive criticism. The New York Film Festival screening of The Windmill Movie was preceded by Quarry, an experimental short that Rogers made during his senior year at Harvard. In its medley of teenagers frolicking, swimming, sunbathing, and cliff-jumping in a town quarry, the short uses non-synchronous voiceover to spout surface-level concerns about topics like factory wages and Vietnam in competition with a free flowing pop score that implies Kenneth Anger as a direct influence. Despite being well-shot (capturing the cliff jumps in majestic glory and sumptuously contemplating the beauty of raindrops on water), this is no lost masterpiece. The combined elements of the twelve-minute film are not engaging enough to affect much effort in sorting out their connections amongst their disparity. It does however make for an interesting precursor to The Windmill Movie and serves to better understand Rogers’ sensibility and dissatisfaction toward his own filmmaking.The other major concern is social class. Early in the film, he states his frustration at being privileged, white, and rich. He follows this with the acknowledgement that he can’t expect sympathy for such a complaint: “it must be infuriating to hear someone complain in the Hamptons.” Yet his concerns are acute and his oscillation between embracing his privilege and being confined by it is one of the film’s most compelling aspects. The title of the film is a reference to the Wainscott Windmill, an antiquated symbol of affluence found in his hometown in East Hampton. In a wonderfully illuminating moment, Rogers reflects on the pride he feels for having a house in Wainscott but also the reality of not having earned it. This is something he seems to feel about his life’s achievements in general: he’s inherited a lot but he hasn’t earned much on his own.
Rogers’ concern about getting an audience to invest in someone whose major gripe is that he is too privileged is unfounded, at least for the first hour. By the end, the pervading sense of solipsism does become wearying but this is due not to the subject of Rogers but to the increased awareness of Olch’s hand as filmmaker rather than as curator of Rogers’ legacy. Olch initially uses Rogers’ audio recordings and on-camera confessionals to narrate the film but when the stock material runs out, Olch begins narrating the film himself by reading extracts from Rogers’ diary. For the last portion of the film, while Rogers was undergoing cancer treatment and unable to write in his diary, Olch takes to emulating Rogers’ writing style, a practice which results in a momentary illusion of identity but an ultimate inability to replicate Rogers’ engaging personality. More to the problem is that Olch’s bland voiceover resembles a disengaged actor delivering a routine audio book recording. For all the mental wrestling that Rogers did over whether or not to cast an actor to play himself, it’s hard not to wonder if Olch ever considered a similar route—and whether he would have benefitted from it. This points to a central problem of the film in that Olch seems uncertain about what degree of involvement he wants to have in the text. As it is, he wavers somewhere between participant and ghostwriter.This criticism is not designed to charge Olch of failing to meet unachievable expectations, like making the material as emotional for the audience member as it is for those involved or recording narration as mellifluous as Werner Herzog’s. Rather it is to attest to the power of the mode of the cinematic autobiography itself. Just as we see Shawn unable to ape Rogers as a physical presence, we also witness Olch’s inability to serve as a spiritual surrogate for the subject. But this is not meant to disparage Olch’s work entirely. The elegiac tone and pacing of the first half of The Windmill Movie is remarkable in its achievement of the uncanny sensation of being inside the fragmented memories of the recently deceased: soaking in nostalgia, grappling with squandered potential, lamenting missed opportunity, relishing a loved one.
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