The Windmill Movie

Richard P. Rogers (1943-2001) was a NYC baby boomer, born to privilege: a Harvard-educated WASP who became a first-rate independent filmmaker (QUARRY and ELEPHANTS both opened at Film Forum in the ’70s) and a gifted film teacher. But he was also a tortured, neurotic soul who freely admitted to being jealous of Steven Spielberg and simultaneously ashamed of the impulse. Torn between narrow class loyalties and broader professional goals and political values, Rogers found the time to juggle multiple relationships with the skill of a world-class Lothario, but was unable to complete an autobiographical film he had worked on for 25 years. His former student Alexander Olch collages a trove of material, including extraordinary scenes of Rogers’s mink-coated Gorgon-mom, and fictional sequences with Wallace Shawn as Dick. THE WINDMILL MOVIE is a heady, fascinating brew that brings together one man’s parentage, culture, education, and ambition — letting the chips fall where they may.

“Both a near uncategorizable feat of experimental documentary filmmaking and a gorgeously constructed emotional portrait of a man grappling with the deepest of artistic and personal issues.”
– Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker magazine

“The most moving documentary of the year … beautiful and heartbreaking” – Anthem Magazine

“Extraordinary.” – William Johnson, Film Quarterly

“A stirring autobiography-by-proxy culled from 200 hours of footage… 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.”
– Nick Schager, Slant Magazine

Each screening of WINDMILL will be preceded by a Rogers short, QUARRY (released 1970, filmed 1967).

“Rogers' approach to "personal" or autobiographical filmmaking was as unique as his own sense of himself. Although Quarry deals with a subject other than Rogers, it can still be described as something of a self-portrait, even though Rogers never appears in the film.

“The film begins focusing on natural elements: rock, water, sky, and the remains of the labor that carved the rocks. This landscape soon fills with the working-class kids and adults who use the quarry as a place of recreation, a place where they can swim, talk, flirt, dive, drink beer, gamble, inscribe their names in graffiti on the cliffs—have a good time with a hint of danger.

“While the images detail the dives, the climbing, the games and stunts, the sound track picks up conversations which tell us this space serves as a haven, a place defined by its difference from the daily grind, an escape from regulation by factory bosses or cops on the street. From these ambient voices on a richly layered sound track, we also pick up stories of death and injury from Vietnam, and recall the year the film was shot. 1967 saw the height of this conflict, and young men like these formed the troops who fought and died in that war.

“Rogers' films always originated in his curiosity, an attempt to understand the world around him.” (Excerpt from THREE SHORT FILMS, Notes by Tom Gunning, Film Historian and Professor of Art History and Cinema & Media Studies, University of Chicago)

“Alexander Olch's fascinating The Windmill Movie is a heady combination of Synecdoche, New York, Annie Hall, Peeping Tom, and It's All True but all the more compelling because The Windmill Movie is all true.” (Paul Brenner, FilmCritic.com)