Cinema Arts Festival Houston 2009

Filmmaker Richard P. Rogers died in 2001 at age 57, leaving behind a lifetime of filmed memories. He was a revered film professor at Harvard and had directed films about artists for the Smithsonian and PBS and short personal films that were greatly admired by his peers. But his grand autobiographical project dragged on unfinished, as he questioned his own narcissism and privilege as a WASP brought up in the Hamptons. After he died, his student and protégé, Alexander Olch, with help from Rogers’s wife, photographer Susan Meiselas, combed through 200 hours of footage, in dusty boxes of film and a broken computer, in an effort to complete Rogers’s grand project. The footage covered his entire life, from his childhood through Harvard, the ’60s New York loft scene, his celebrated friends Wallace Shawn and Bob Balaban, his complicated romantic life, and his bouts with cancer. “Olch not only completed the project that had haunted Rogers for so many years, he transcended it. The Windmill Movie is a riveting cinematic ode to a conflicted artist and man. The film meticulously captures the messy, often contradictory, emotions that, for Rogers, remained irreconcilable. With a muted self-consciousness and a refusal to sentimentalize, Olch reveals his subject’s fundamental struggles with feelings about romance, family, entitlement, and creative expression. The film is nothing short of mesmerizing” —Silverdocs