The Windmill Movie
Directed by Alexander Olch
At Film Forum through June 30
Runtime: 82 min.

Imagine if Don Quixote tried to write Don Quixote. That kind of complex and quixotic self-exploration defines Alexander Olch’s The Windmill Movie, an extraordinary, if indulgent, documentary about indie filmmaker Richard P. Rogers that opens at Film Forum this week.

Rogers spent 25 years of his career attempting to craft a cinematic autobiography that encompassed everything—from his childhood in the Hamptons to his artistic career and love life. When he died in 2001, he had never managed to shape what would have been his magnum opus, but he left hundreds of hours of wildly diverse footage: home movies, interviews with family, scenes from his life—even scripted reenactments. With encouragement from photographer Susan Meiselas, Rogers’ widow, Olch sifted through all the yards and yards of celluloid to cobble together a documentary—not the autobiography Rogers so tenaciously pursued, but a film about that film.

In addition to Rogers’ footage, Olch conducted his own interviews and reenactments. The resulting panoply, spanning nine decades and two directors, is a unique, engrossing accomplishment. The Windmill Movie offers a comprehensive portrait of Rogers, and, to supplement this study of his life, Film Forum is screening “Quarry,” a great 12-minute short film from Rogers, as a preface to the doc, thus giving Rogers some aesthetic context. But far more importantly, Olch’s work surveys the limits of film’s ability to convey a life. It asks if the mimetic nature of film—and all art, really—is deeply flawed, incapable of fully encapsulating human experience.

The obvious danger of Windmill is that all this analysis could be perceived as egotistical navel-gazing and, during those scenes when Rogers is speaking to himself before a mirror, one begins to feel the film has become too self-absorbed. But these moments are rare: Windmill successfully transposes Quixote’s windmills of gold-age Spain to a modern medium and a contemporary world, challenging the limits of art while it expands them.