The Windmill Movie

The film its subject couldn’t complete

July 17, 2009|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

Judging solely by his accomplishments, it would be hard to discern that Richard P. Rogers led a frustrating life. Before he died of cancer in 2001 at 57, he taught and ran the Film Studies Center at Harvard. He made several well-regarded documentaries, including 1991’s “Pictures From a Revolution,’’ an impressionistic work about Nicaragua and the Sandinistas. He helped found the film program at State University of New York, Purchase, one of the best in the country.

Those details, though, are the rough sketch for an obituary. Between the lines, Rogers doubted himself. He was a child of affluence who found not-insignificant success when he wanted extraordinary achievement. He plugged away, while greater things and greatness itself eluded him. His disappointments are the subject of “The Windmill Movie,’’ a remarkable documentary attempt to reconcile Rogers’s sense of personal, professional, and artistic malaise, which culminated in his decades-long attempt to make a film about his life. He left behind more than 200 hours of footage but no finished movie.

Alexander Olch, one of Rogers’s former Harvard students, combines some of that footage, turns his own camera on the women in Rogers’s life, including his widow and collaborator, Susan Meiselas, and orchestrates a bewitching movie that folds into itself. This is about right for a man who seemed to think in origami.

Olch makes the crux of Rogers’s internal conflict immediately apparent. Speaking into a camera in front of a hedge (what else?), Rogers wonders why making a film about oneself is so hard. He says he can’t bring himself to do it because that would mean confronting the truth about himself. That confrontation risks sounding like complaint, and, as Rogers says, there’s something unseemly about a person of privilege trying to sing the blues. (He’s not wrong.) And yet he believed he was a failure - at least in his family’s tax bracket.

He and his sister, Bard, were raised Hamptons WASPs. Daddy worked in the city. Mommy stayed home. Drinking was both a balm and form of communication. And over the years, Rogers came to resent his upbringing even as he appears to live off the comforts it afforded him. His sense of hypocrisy became a kind of pathology, heightened when he became a young adult in the 1960s and 1970s. Rogers mentions his desire to be something other than who he is. His greatest personal failure appears to be failing to shed his own skin. He picks at it, instead.

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