Alexander Olch on Richard P. Rogers
By Robert Levin
Special to amNewYork
On the surface, Richard P. Rogers (1944-2001) lived a charmed life. Born into the privilege of the Upper East Side and the Hamptons, he reached the upper echelon of his two professions, as a Harvard professor and a highly acclaimed filmmaker (of multiple documentaries and experimental films). He earned the love of a good woman, the Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, as well as the respect and admiration of countless colleagues, students and friends.
Yet “The Windmill Movie,” which documentarian Alexander Olch assembled from more than two decades of footage shot by Rogers for an unfinished autobiographical film, reveals the darker, conflicted soul brewing beneath the superficial idyll. It’s an intensely personal exploration of the themes that defined the man’s life and the role of the cinematic apparatus in drawing them out. amNewYork spoke to Olch about the film, currently playing at Film Forum.
What was your personal relationship with Richard?
I knew him as my teacher, but as fellow New Yorkers (we discovered we actually grew up on the same block in adjacent buildings on 74th St.) meeting in Cambridge, we sort of grew closer together and he ended up producing my thesis film there. I guess you could certainly call him my mentor.
How aware were you of his autobiographical project?
The last summers he was working on his film, the summers of 1999 and 2000, those two summers were the summers that I was working on my thesis film. So I would come by his loft and show him footage. He would look at my stuff and then I would see off to the side his editing computers. I remember one time I went over there and asked him, “What’s this,” and there was an image of a house on a beach. [He said], “This is a house in Georgica, and this is the one film that I abandoned. And I’ve now gone back to try and finish it.” And then I asked him another question, “Whose house is that?” And he said, “Well, it’s not really about that,” and then [turned off] the screen. So that’s as far as it got. He was very reserved and circumspect about what he was doing, certainly with me and as I looked through the footage I think to a certain extent with himself.
What led you to finishing the film?
The project [grew] organically. So originally the idea was very simple and very small, which was just to cut together some footage for his friends, who were curious as to what he was up to for all those years. It was when working and going through all this footage that it just struck me that, I guess, what I felt as a filmmaker was, there’s something about this character, both when he’s onscreen and [in] the stuff that he shot that [presents] such a wonderful contradiction. Everything about him is quite debatable, both within himself and then [in] what you think of what he’s doing [and in] what he thinks of what he’s doing. There’s something wonderful, if you’re writing a character from scratch, [about having] a character that embodies such debate and such contradictions. [It] is such a fantastically difficult thing to do. I was just very drawn to the way in which every angle at which you could look at him yielded two answers. If you wanted to say, “Ok, this film’s about a famous filmmaker,” you could say, “Ok, he’s well known but on the other hand he’s not well known.” You could say, “Here’s a guy who’s making a film about himself,” well it’s kind of about himself, but it’s kind of about this town of Georgica. Or, very simply, you think he is really self-indulgent, or you think he’s not. And you can go back and forth.
Of all these themes raised by the film, did any particularly stand out for you?
One theme that I was very interested in was, [and] this is more of an indirect kind of angle, the way in which Dick comes from this path which really is a fundamentally historical American attitude. In reality Richard Pendleton Rogers descended from Admiral Pendleton, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and here he is making a film where he’s kind of really searching for himself in this landscape, in this land [which embodies] a very kind of almost aristocratic, old-fashioned idea. And here he is, in this amazing relationship with Susan Meiselas who is a Jewish [woman] from a family of immigrants, very successful in her own right, on her own merit, having nothing to do with the history of her family. And here was a kind of story of America, in a way of the sort of the old and the new coming together, looking at it either as old artists and new artists, or just culture [or] society [in general], there’s a very interesting dynamic going on there because what the Susan character represents, and really what a lot of the women, all these other things represent in a way, if you want to look at it from that kind of historical context, is what is coming to an end with this old-fashioned aristocratic idea of America.
