The Windmill Movie
Jan. 7th, 2012 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coyotegothLast night, I re-watched The Windmill Movie, a movie edited together by Alexander Olch from footage shot by the documentarian Richard P. Rogers over the course of his life. I knew Dick fairly well, many years ago; he was a teacher of mine in film school; it was odd, and moving, to watch his lifelong struggle to create a lasting, meaningful autobiographical work. Per his self-filmed testimony, Dick always felt difficulty in engaging with himself as a film subject; a child of privilege (he grew up in the Hamptons)1, he felt self-disgust in airing his dissatisfaction with his own life, and The Windmill Movie records his (posthumously successful, with the aid of Olch, another former student of Dick's) struggle to overcome this inhibition- to engage cinematically with his own life.2
The movie approaches Dick's life with many strategies: his own filmed autobiographical material; interviews with Wallace Shawn (who discusses knowing Dick at Dalton); Shawn rereading passages of Dick's own narration, transforming Dick's bitterness and creative frustration with his own wry delivery; Olch's filmed material of interviews with Dick (near the end, we see him as a prematurely aged man, sitting in front of the titular windmill: an object his grandfather had transported from Montauk to Dick's hometown of Wainscott. Dick discusses this in the context of the mental illness which apparently was a genetic legacy for his family; in a clip from Elephants, another self-portrait (and an obvious discussion of memory), we hear Dick's mother discoursing on the numerous members of his family who met troubled ends.) At times, Dick's camerawork could be quite eloquent: as we hear Dick's written passages (read by Olch) on memory- where do memories go after we forget them?- we watch a shot captured by Dick of a boy riding a bicycle through a hedge; the camera pans up- and there's a graveyard. Then, beyond it, a crowd of what initially looks like socialites, but is, in fact, Dick's own film crew. The final shot is similarly eloquent: Dick and Olch, with Loch operating the camera. The surf- like memory- flows in, then recedes, until Dick has Olch walk out into the waves, until the water rushes over the lens in a sea of green, washing away everything else.
It's an odd feeling, to watch a person you've known discoursing on their own life and its oncoming end (no less so, given how he died); the subject ages between one shot and the next, time rushing onward. At the same time, I think of one of the movie's final scenes: Dick discusses how, even as his mortal form crumbles, he's still here, on the reels of film he captured, a persistent memory. (Somehow I found myself thinking of George Roy Hill's film of Slaughterhouse-five at this point, with Glenn Gould's piano music gently accompanying.) In the end, even as one of his last self-filmed scenes discusses how he has spent what turned out to be his last healthy summer failing to engage with his subject, I feel relief- because I am watching that film, pulled together with Olch's relative objectivity of viewpoint, and the persistence of Dick's filmed memories. Even if he himself no longer exists, and the actual memories of his life are no more, they do still exist, and are watched, and do, indeed, form an artistic statement: the filmmaker's difficulty in engaging his subject has become the subject, and a resonant and meaningful- even profound- one. And I think he'd like that.
1I have a strong memory of his discussing something similar in class once; I asked him if, if financial success was so important, this meant that Tony Scott was a more significant filmmaker than Stanley Kubrick. Dick, a volatile man, erupted in frustration that I didn't understand at the time.
2At one point, he films himself in a mirror, with his recorded voiceover musing on the cliche of the filmmaker filming himself; I could only chuckle, remembering his criticizing a self-portrait film of mine, which contained exactly such a shot, in exactly such terms.
The movie approaches Dick's life with many strategies: his own filmed autobiographical material; interviews with Wallace Shawn (who discusses knowing Dick at Dalton); Shawn rereading passages of Dick's own narration, transforming Dick's bitterness and creative frustration with his own wry delivery; Olch's filmed material of interviews with Dick (near the end, we see him as a prematurely aged man, sitting in front of the titular windmill: an object his grandfather had transported from Montauk to Dick's hometown of Wainscott. Dick discusses this in the context of the mental illness which apparently was a genetic legacy for his family; in a clip from Elephants, another self-portrait (and an obvious discussion of memory), we hear Dick's mother discoursing on the numerous members of his family who met troubled ends.) At times, Dick's camerawork could be quite eloquent: as we hear Dick's written passages (read by Olch) on memory- where do memories go after we forget them?- we watch a shot captured by Dick of a boy riding a bicycle through a hedge; the camera pans up- and there's a graveyard. Then, beyond it, a crowd of what initially looks like socialites, but is, in fact, Dick's own film crew. The final shot is similarly eloquent: Dick and Olch, with Loch operating the camera. The surf- like memory- flows in, then recedes, until Dick has Olch walk out into the waves, until the water rushes over the lens in a sea of green, washing away everything else.
It's an odd feeling, to watch a person you've known discoursing on their own life and its oncoming end (no less so, given how he died); the subject ages between one shot and the next, time rushing onward. At the same time, I think of one of the movie's final scenes: Dick discusses how, even as his mortal form crumbles, he's still here, on the reels of film he captured, a persistent memory. (Somehow I found myself thinking of George Roy Hill's film of Slaughterhouse-five at this point, with Glenn Gould's piano music gently accompanying.) In the end, even as one of his last self-filmed scenes discusses how he has spent what turned out to be his last healthy summer failing to engage with his subject, I feel relief- because I am watching that film, pulled together with Olch's relative objectivity of viewpoint, and the persistence of Dick's filmed memories. Even if he himself no longer exists, and the actual memories of his life are no more, they do still exist, and are watched, and do, indeed, form an artistic statement: the filmmaker's difficulty in engaging his subject has become the subject, and a resonant and meaningful- even profound- one. And I think he'd like that.
1I have a strong memory of his discussing something similar in class once; I asked him if, if financial success was so important, this meant that Tony Scott was a more significant filmmaker than Stanley Kubrick. Dick, a volatile man, erupted in frustration that I didn't understand at the time.
2At one point, he films himself in a mirror, with his recorded voiceover musing on the cliche of the filmmaker filming himself; I could only chuckle, remembering his criticizing a self-portrait film of mine, which contained exactly such a shot, in exactly such terms.
