The Windmill Movie
Dir: Alexander Olch
Rating: 4.0
The Film Desk
82 Minutes
Richard Rogers' Quarry screened before The Windmill Movie when I saw the latter; hopefully it's been arranged for that to happen at every screening it gets. The film's star is the short's director, a documentary filmmaker and professor at Harvard, and getting to see a piece of his work before watching him get dissected by former student Alexander Olch is vital to getting a real sense of the man. The short is a beautiful portrait film about a small town quarry and the groups of kids that gather around it during the summer. They talk about their lives and jump into the water; after the end of the season it all freezes over. The camera captures it all with a warmhearted sense of objectivity.
"I have no trouble making someone else's documentary, just my own," Rogers says before embarking on another for-hire job directing a PBS documentary. He says this into his camera, which he has been using to make his own documentary for years, a self-portrait. The empathic eye from Quarry is missing, the crisp 16mm replaced by stark, grainy video and an abject sense of anxiousness and sadness. When Rogers died in 2001 at the age of 56, he'd spent 20 years trying to make this film; he'd accumulated 200 hours of footage. Not finishing the film was a great frustration, but Rogers' demand for accuracy was unreasonable - he wanted to capture himself as he was, ignoring the constant passage of time - so he laid it all out on the line in his on-camera confessionals, revealing his guilt over his privileged upbringing; his insecurities and occasional forays into self-loathing; his off-putting egotism. Rogers' frustrations as a filmmaker shift within the substance of the movie we're watching, ping-ponging between his rather unbelievable jealousy of Steven Spielberg (whose successes don't seem to parallel any of Rogers' ambitions) and our larger and external knowledge that he died without completing this self-administered cinematic exorcism.
The Windmill Movie pulls no punches in laying its subject bare. That all of this footage exists and that the revealing insights it offers were the creation of its subject is both precisely and beside the point. Is this the film Rogers was trying to make his whole life? In substance, no, but in its spirit, in the way that it is the partially successful realization of his ambitions, previously defeated by time and, possibly, fear, it is a thorough expression of friendship and admiration. Still, a portrait is not the same as a self-portrait, no matter how much of its subject's self-image is allowed to show through. The opportunity to see an image created in this manner, by an interpreter from the subject's materials, however, is a fascinating opportunity to see into the ethereal possibilities that film offers for self-preservation. The question of what type of man Rogers was is circled so extensively that, in the end, it becomes as unanswerable as it was for himself. There are moments that reveal him to not be a very nice one, although that is not the overall thrust of the film. More often than not, The Windmill Movie reveals that, regardless of who he may or may not have been, Rogers was loved, as we see in home video footage of happier moments of his life, in posthumous interviews with family and friends, and in the humane coldness through which Rogers is allowed to deliver himself to us in spite of these happier things, via Olch's empathic eye.
by Andrei Alupului