Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by tinear (A) on May 02, 2011 at 16:41:39

Attending all the best schools (Dalton, Harvard), upper-East Side Manhattan, Hampton summers.... Richard Pendleton Rogers had it all. But he also had a blindingly fierce discomfort with all this unearned privledge he enjoyed and had done nothing to earn. Highly respected by his film colleagues, Rogers remained unknown among the larger public, preferring to make very small documentary films, many of which were avant-guard autobiographies, or biographies.
This film, by its end, will completely have distorted and disoriented your view of the possibility of the genre. If Tarkovsky had made an autobiography, it surely would have been this innovative. The erstwhile film critic David Ansen knew Rogers very well, having roomed for a time with him at Harvard:
"A film about a filmmaker struggling to make a film that questions the very premise of making autobiographical films, “The Windmill Movie” takes Rogers’s self-reflective, experimental style one step further by venturing into fictional speculation. Wallace Shawn, a friend of Rogers and Ms. Meiselas’s, appears in the film both as himself and as Rogers. Sometimes you hear Rogers’s voice narrating; later you hear a narration written in Rogers’s “voice” that Mr. Olch reads. The result is a free-associating film that arcs back and forth between past and present, documentary and fiction."
This film should be far more well-known and appreciated.