The Windmill Movie
Jul 24 - Jul 30, 2009
(Alexander Olch, USA, 2008, 82 min)
Director in attendance Friday & Saturday!
Discussion hosted by Warren Etheridge after Friday 7pm show
Preceeded by Quarry
(Richard P. Rogers, USA, 1970, 12 min)
What do you call a documentary composed of elements of somebody else's unfinished diary film? Homage? Portrait? Assemblage? Case study? Richard Rogers was a NYC baby boomer, born to privilege: Harvard-educated, he became a first-rate independent director and a gifted film teacher. But he was also a tortured neurotic soul torn between narrow class loyalties and broader professional goals and political values. Though Rogers found the time to juggle multiple relationships with the skill of a world-class Lothario, he was unable to complete an autobiographical film he had worked on for 25 years. His former student Alexander Olch brings together a trove of leftover material, including extraordinary scenes of Rogers’s mink-coated, domineering mother, along with fictional sequences with Wallace Shawn as Richard. 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.
Shown along with Richard Rogers' first film Quarry, a black and white short made near Quincy, MA with beautifully composed rocky landscapes and shots of young people worthy of Robert Frank's The Americans.
"It reveals his eye for creating voluptuous, evocative cinematic tableaus that have luminous inner life." -NY Times
"It's a reconstructed depiction of a contradictory artist and man, 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." —Slant
Watch the trailer:
