The Windmill Movie
Essential Documentaries
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1h 20m
Directed by Alexander Olch | 82 mins | 2008
“What if someone else wrote your autobiography?” That is the question posited by Alexander Olch as he tells the life-story of his former Harvard professor, the filmmaker Richard P. Rogers. For twenty years, Rogers worked on an autobiographical portrait that remained incomplete upon his death in 2001. Hours and hours of footage, stored on hard drives in the home Rogers shared with his partner, the acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas, were discovered, and form the foundation of this exploration of the scion of an old New York family who chose the life of the artist. Olch doesn’t tell Rogers’ story as much as creates it, filling in and conjuring what didn’t exist. The Windmill Movie may bear a passing resemblance to the frequently labeled “hybrid-documentary,” but it is in fact completely singular, a film-form unto itself.
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