New Release: The Windmill Movie DVD

The Windmill Movie has been described as everything from a raw footage diary and a documentary portrait to an experimental montage and a cinematic homage. Decide for yourself, because Zeitgeist released the film on DVD on March 22, 2011.

A truly genre-defying work, The Windmill Movie feels like a profile of documentary and experimental filmmaker Richard Rogers. A Harvard-educated, New York City baby boomer born to privilege, Rogers completed many remarkable films over the course of his career, including 1991’s Pictures From a Revolution. But his untimely death at age 57 in 2001 put an end to his magnum opus: an autobiographical movie he had worked on for 25 years.

Culling from a 200-hour trove of Rogers’ material, director Alex Olch (Rogers’ protégé) set out to complete Rogers’ unfinished film. The Windmill Movie plays like a mind-bending essay film constructed of sun-dappled Hamptons lawn parties, plane rides to exotic locales and raw moments with Rogers’ domineering mink-coated mother, plus archival audio and new footage featuring Rogers’ childhood friend, actor Wallace Shawn (Jack and the Beanstalk). Ultimately, it’s a cinematic amalgam of one filmmaker’s footage used by another filmmaker that beautifully explores the chasm between documentary and fiction.

The DVD contains the following special features:

  • two previously unreleased Richard Rogers shorts: Elephants: Fragments of an Argument and 226-1690 (aka The Answering Machine Movie)
  • original essay by critic Scott Foundas

The Windmill Movie DVD carries a suggested retail price of $29.95.

 

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.