NYFF. The Windmill Movie.

The Windmill Movie is the film that Richard P "Dick" Rogers wanted to make, and tried to make, for much of his life. It's an autobiography, assembled from footage and papers that Rogers left behind, by Alexander Olch, a former Harvard student who financed his archaeology of his former teacher by designing neckties that are sold at the finest department stores in New York.

Updated through 10/11.

The recurring image in The Windmill Movie is a shot of Rogers, with a camera in his hand, looking and shooting himself in a mirror. A cliché, says Rogers, in typical Wasp self-disparagement, but like most annoying clichés it contains some truth. Rogers was short and balding, a prodigiously charming golden-tongued talker, which made him a popular teacher. He was a Wasp with mocking scorn for his tribe, whom he filmed and satirized relentlessly in the green and boozy Hamptons sanctum of Wainscott. He loved women, and talked about them constantly, if the film produced by his widow Susan Meiselas is an accurate reflection. He was also a merciless critic of himself, sometimes sounding like a goy version of Woody Allen. He reminds you that he didn't buy his own house in Wainscott - he inherited it. He also reminds you that he was not Steven Spielberg. It bothered him, but it won't bother you.

Rogers died of cancer in 2001 - a melanoma on his foot that, left unattended, spread throughout his body and made the last years of his life a struggle. The Windmill Movie is the story of an unfinished film from an unfinished life. There wasn't much that was sentimental about Rogers. His humor seems to have been too uncontrollable for that. What he didn't film and dissect, he discussed and ridiculed. It all seemed good-natured, an achievement in itself when you saw where Rogers came from.

Olch's documentary is a collage of footage from Rogers's black hole of a personal archive, with a narrative drawn from diaries that Rogers left behind. The third-person story is still deeply personal, once intended to become a dramatic film, with Cynthia Nixon playing Meiselas and Wally Shawn playing Rogers. Olch scuttled that approach in favor of putting Rogers's own voice at the center. It was the right decision, reached after years of trial and error. Rogers was quite a performer.

And quite a filmmaker. At the New York Film Festival, Olch's documentary was preceded by Quarry, a 1970 film of 12 minutes by Rogers. In black and white, the film begins with tactile shots of rocks and water in a abandoned quarry outside Boston where teenagers came to swim, smoke and drink beer. Then the camera moves to the human landscape, with kids talking about all sorts of things, including wisps of conversation about Vietnam, where some had served. (There are even a few sailors in uniform, sitting on the rocks.) You feel the indolence of youth here, and the fleeting nature of it. The film ends with chalk writings on the rocks, some bold, others faded, a reminder that if any of these inscriptions can be read ten years from now, they will be faint and barely visible. It's a letting go that Olch echoes in his film about Rogers coming to terms with his own life ending early.

We hear at the beginning, when Rogers talks about growing up in Wainscott, that he had "strong erotic memories of falling in love with people's mothers," who spent the summer at the beach while the men stayed in Manhattan and worked. Perhaps that erotic attraction to older women had something to do with his own mother, seated in a mink coat on a June day on a Wainscott lawn and attacking her son. She could have been a model for a character in some Americanized Monty Python sketch. Rogers had a thing for Jewish women; and he must have been a hell of a charmer, given his looks. You hear that from his friends, most of whom were interviewed and then kept out of the film by Olch, who wanted his own kind of narrative.

The poignant, tender film lacks a section about Dick Rogers as a teacher - odd, given that the director was his student at Harvard, and given Rogers's long tenure there, beginning in the days when Sundance didn't exist, before there was a film school at every university. Nor do we see much footage from the many documentaries that Rogers shot for hire, which were commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other groups, which people drawn to Rogers will have to seek out in other places besides this film. No doubt they will now. Word is that The Windmill Movie could play in theaters in the spring.

- David D'Arcy

"Imagine Doug Block's laceratingly personal 51 Birch St as compiled by his next-door neighbor and you'll have a sense of the overall experience of The Windmill Movie," writes Jeff Reichert in Reverse Shot. "Rogers may be our avatar, but Olch's never far from our consciousness, weighing in via voiceover on the process of culling through the mountains of raw footage, the problems of negotiating the material with the filmmaker's widow with her own agenda at his side, and his place in relation to this thorny new work, an amalgamation of approximating Rogers's intents and Olch's mediating influence. As such, we feel less like we're watching the older filmmaker's life story than sitting over Olch's shoulder as the zips through images on a monitor, trying to guess at some sense of order. It's sticky, and the problems with The Windmill Movie 0 and there are many - almost zero out what makes the film interesting in a landscape of American documentary that has grown unnecessary safe and formulaic."

"It's a reconstructed depiction of a contradictory artist and man, an act of memory preservation and facilitation whose eloquence, largely free of pat analysis, captures the messy, paradoxical emotions that often remain irreconcilable to the grave," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"Quarry says more in 14 minutes about the American climate in the late 60s then all the Summer of Love montages set to 'White Rabbit' combined," argues Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "Rogers begins with a black-and-white abstract formalism anticipating the work of Peter Hutton - or at least the dazzling silvery textures of last year's At Sea, of which I wrote that a 'desaturated shot of black-and-white waves forming patterns so dense and shimmery... seems like if you stared long enough, a secret 3D image might pop out.' Where Hutton holds the shots, Rogers gives you time to just start appreciating the ripples of slightly disturbed water before it's on to the next shot: sensory overload.... It's present-tense history, and it's gorgeous."

Update, 10/11: For Stephen Snart, writing at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, "a central problem of the film [is] 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."

Posted by dwhudson at October 9, 2008 2:03 AM