The Windmill Movie
Essential Documentaries
•
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.
Up Next in Essential Documentaries
-
The Decline of Western Civilization
Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 100 mins | 1981
Without doubt one of the great rock docs, Penelope Spheeris’s headily discordant portrait of West Coast punk—her directorial debut—showcases such hardcore luminaries as X, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Germs. As pure and pungent a time capsule as th... -
The Decline of Western Civilization P...
Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 93 mins | 1988
The scummy, lightening-in-a-bottle Los Angeles punk scene that Penelope Spheeris captured in the first “Decline of Western Civilization” (1981) had morphed considerably by the time of this second instalment, nearly a decade later: the hair was bigger... -
The Decline of Western Civilization P...
Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 86 mins | 1998
After a detour into the high heady heyday of Sunset Strip hair metal in the second film of her essential social history of rock ’n’ roll in southern California, Spheeris returned to the hardcore punk roots of her first Decline, embedding herself amon...
