User:PearlEmerald/sandbox

The Windmill Movie is a 2008 American feature documentary film written and directed by Alexander Olch. The film stars Wallace Shawn, Bob Balaban and Susan Meiselas.

The film is notable for its unique mixture of fiction and documentary techniques.

The Windmill Movie premiered in the Main Slate of 2008 New York Film Festival. It was released theatrically at Film Forum in New York City by The Film Desk on June 17, 2009.

The film is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

Plot
200 hours of footage, dusty boxes of film, a broken editing computer: these were the pieces of filmmaker and professor Richard P. Rogers’ daring attempt to make his own autobiography. Director of the Harvard University Film Study Center, Rogers died in July 2001, leaving behind boxes of film, the project unfinished and a lifetime of filmed memories, until his widow, acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas, commissioned his student and protégé, Alexander Olch to make a film out of the pieces. Starting in the Hamptons, in the town of Wainscott, the film weaves Roger's footage into a journey through childhood memories, a less than encouraging mother, a family background of privilege, and Rogers' persistent, dogged attempts to document his own life, his own constant search for meaning. Rogers’ friend, the actor and writer Wallace Shawn, joins in the process, as the film explores the differences between documentary and fiction techniques — Olch writes an original narration in his teacher’s voice — and grows increasingly provocative and tragic, telling the story of Rogers’ life through the very end. It is a unique cinematic experience which drives at the meaning of why we document our lives, and why we make films.

Cast

 * Wallace Shawn, as himself


 * Bob Balaban, as himself


 * Susan Meiselas, as herself


 * Richard P. Rogers, as himself


 * Alexander Olch, as the narrator

Production
The film includes footage that was shot over the course of 20 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Haiti; Los Angeles, California; New York City; Wainscott in Long Island, New York.

Two years after Rogers' death and having graduated from Harvard College, Olch returned to New York, and in a strange coincidence moved in to an apartment downtown on Mott Street, just a few doors from Rogers’ loft located at the New York City Landmark building of Fourteenth Ward Industrial School. The loft was the same as it has always been, except now only his widow Susan Meiselas was living there. Meiselas, the renowned Magnum photographer, traveled so much that she and Olch did not run into each other for an entire year. So Olch left her a note, slid under the door, hoping that she was doing ok.

She called Olch the next week, saying oddly enough, that she could use his help on something. Rogers’ old early edition Avid editing computer was still sitting in the studio, broken, and she was wondering if there was any footage stored on it. Olch came by the next week, and using the skills Rogers had taught him well, found a way to fix the SCSI cables, and got the system to boot up. He started looking through the files and found some strangely compelling images of country beaches, tennis courts, and sailing from the 1980’s.

Meiselas explained that this was part of a project Rogers had begun shooting about the place of Wainscott in the Hamptons where he had grown up as a child. She had no idea how far Rogers had gotten with sequencing the film before his death.

Olch was intrigued and wanted to see more. They agreed that he would watch additional footage for a week and cut together some selections for her to watch. A week later he showed her a 35 minute cut.

With her approval and encouragement, Olch started working more, diving deeper into this mysterious trove of images which dated back to Super8 footage shot by Rogers’ father in the 1920’s. Olch was fascinated by what he found and was moved to once again be connecting with his departed teacher and would-be collaborator. He showed her another cut two weeks later, and after a month they both started to feel that in this material there could be an amazing film. They agreed to push forward, Olch directing, editing, and writ- ing, Meiselas producing. They did not know where the footage would lead them, or even how much of it there was, and the project gradually grew and took on dimensions neither could ever have imagined.

Rogers’ project was an autobiography, or really an exploration of his attempts and dif- ficulties in making an autobiography. In Olch’s hands this material began to take on even more dimensions - it was a kind of puzzle, an autobiography that could never be made, a exploration of the differences between documentary and fiction techniques, and a portrait of a man Olch cared for deeply - a man confronting the perils of a creative life and the creative process of making art.

To play on Rogers’ interest in fiction filmmaking, Olch developed the idea of adding actors to the equation. He remembered a peculiar coincidence from years back, that Rogers sometimes got teased that he looked like one of his friends, the actor and writer Wallace Shawn. Shawn was also a long time friend of Meiselas, who read to him a long letter from Olch explaining his new idea to add Shawn to this already complicated film. It was an experiment, but in the spirit of Rogers’ experimental films, somehow this idea made perfect sense. Shawn agreed to work with Olch, and came over to the loft one day, to read some lines that Rogers had once said. That first line reading is the first of Shawn’s scenes in The Windmill Movie.

That work grew to include Shawn's friend Bob Balaban, who joined Shawn and Olch for the trip to Rogers’ house in the Hamptons, as well as Rogers’ other filmmaker friends who contributed their creative energies to this vastly complex filmic puzzle — filmmaker David Grubin who went on to co-produce the film, as well as Rogers’ colleagues from Harvard, Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Alfred Guzzetti, and Rogers’ neighbor in Wainscott, Robert Benton all watched cuts of the film at many stages contributing their own experiences and memories of Rogers. The entire process, especially for Shawn, Olch, and Meiselas, was profoundly challenging both creatively and personally. No one had expected that the missing links in Rogers’ project were so personal and connected so intimately to footage of his life with Meiselas. To craft a creative solution for the film was a unique and memorable experience for everyone involved.

Release
Following its theatrical release in 2009, the film aired on HBO in US. It was released on DVD by Zeitgeist Films in 2011.

Critical response

The Windmill Movie has received critical acclaim in the national press.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 86%, based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 7.2/10.

John Anderson of The Washington Post called the movie "a profoundly empathetic study of unfulfilled artistic ambition, and of the emotional ruthlessness that often separates great artists from decent people."

Calling The Windmill Movie "a mind-bending autobiography by proxy", S. James Snyder of Time Out New York wrote "Olch completes this tortured, unflinching opus about a man so distraught by not having all the answers that he failed to notice he was asking all the right questions."

Meanwhile, Stephen Holden of The New York Times criticized the film saying it "leaves a paradoxical impression. As much as Mr. Rogers fretted about the difficulty of revealing his true self, the movie lays out a detailed map of his psyche but very little sense of what it was like to know him. His reputation as a charming, aristocratic bon vivant remains almost entirely hearsay."

Box office
The film grossed US $30,050 in 4 theaters nationally.