A difficult-to-classify film, The Windmill Movie is certainly a documentary, but is it biography or autobiography? The subject is independent filmmaker and teacher Richard P. Rogers, who spent decades recording his life on camera and storing the footage alongside home movies his father shot years earlier. Rogers' intention was eventually to edit the mass into a film called Windmill, in which he would finally confront his ambivalence about the privileged life into which he'd been born, his perceived failures as an artist, and his habit of juggling multiple lovers simultaneously. But Rogers died of cancer at age 57 in 2001, before he could undertake the project, and his longtime companion Susan Meiselas invited Rogers' former student Alexander Olch to help organize the material. Olch's response was not so much to complete the film Rogers might have made, but rather use the footage (including interviews with Rogers' demanding mother and clips from an early effort Rogers made to re-create scenes from his life with actors) in a portrait that also includes narration read from a supposed diary of Rogers (actually written by Olch) and inventive sequences featuring friends like Wallace Shawn and Bob Balaban. Although provocative, the film oddly omits some of the most obvious material—such as clips from Rogers' many documentaries. DVD extras include two shorts by Rogers: Elephants: Fragments of an Argument, a semi-autobiographical work, and 226-1690, an impressionistic piece with urban images set against a soundtrack of incoming calls on an answering machine. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
The Windmill Movie
(2009) 80 min. DVD: $29.99. Zeitgeist Films (avail. from most distributors). Volume 26, Issue 3
The Windmill Movie
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