Alexander Olch's fascinating The Windmill Movie is a heady combination of Synecdoche, New York, Annie Hall, Peeping Tom, and It's All True but all the more compelling because The Windmill Movie is all true.

The subject of The Windmill Movie is Richard P. Rogers, born into the Hamptons upper crust but, spurning his world of privilege, he became instead an independent filmmaker, a film teacher at Harvard (Rogers was Olch's mentor there) and a producer and director for a collection of PBS documentaries. And for most of his working life, Rogers shot footage for a never completed documentary on his life and art -- 25 years worth of home movie footage, beautiful shots of landscapes, interviews with his immediate family, and self-musings for the camera. At Rogers's death in 2001, his unfinished film died with him. That is, until Olch, at the behest of his widow, photographer Susan Meiselas, invited Olch to look at 200 hours of footage spanning decades and to assemble Rogers' loose ends into a completed film. And this Olch has done -- with great panache, elegance, and emotion.

The Windmill Movie follows Rogers through the course of an artistic lifetime and the film becomes intimately intertwined with that life... so much so that the distinctions blur on whether Rogers is making a film of his life or if the film is his life.

Rogers is uncomfortable with his decision to start on this film essay of himself. One of the opening shots has Rogers pointing his camera into his mirrored reflection and commenting, "This shot is a cliché and that's what the shot is going to be. It is the stock material of a personal documentary. The question is: is there always anything to say? If any of this means anything or is it just a kind of voyeurism, a kind of auto-eroticism as some will have it. Just a kind of jerking off." (Olch recreates this scene later in the film with Wallace Shawn playing Rogers and recreating Rogers's dialogue.)

In Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane comments on his born-rich station in life by remarking, "I always gagged on that silver spoon." In The Windmill Movie Rogers is also gagging, wary and too self-aware, questioning whether he has anything interesting to say: "It is so stupid to be this privileged, to be this white, this rich, and to be sort of bitching about it." But it is this hyper-awareness of himself that makes Rogers so absorbing a subject.

In the brilliant assemblage of found footage, Olch orchestrates a symphonic celebration of life, turning meditations on the self into a work of art. Olch intercuts 8mm footage of Rogers as a child, Rogers' friends Wallace Shawn and Bob Balaban visiting his home after his death, footage from Rogers' unfinished film, television clips, and even a collection of white, green, and blue film leader all effortlessly toggling back and forth in time.

Rogers' self-doubt and neurotic obsessions are cuttingly illustrated in Rogers' footage of his parents. Rogers' father is an ever-unfolding manic-depressive while his mother, posing on a lounge chair in June wearing a fur coat, is the stuff of nightmares.

Art and life are different things, and artistic perfection is easier to achieve than perfection in life. And perhaps that is why Rogers never finished his film. In a less-than-perfect reality, particularly when it becomes the subject of a film, the movie can never be complete because it will always be imperfect. Like everybody's lives, Rogers encapsulates the human condition completely, telling his girlfriend in The Windmill Movie, "I think that what's wrong with our movie is that it isn't shot well." Rich or poor, none of our films are shot well.



Go, Sancho!