To be assembled posthumously: The Windmill Movie on DVD

Richard P. Rogers was born into East Coast WASP privilege and most of its accompanying neuroses. His people summered in the Hamptons. They sent him to Dalton and Harvard to make something of himself. But Rogers became an experimental and documentary filmmaker—a filmmaker’s filmmaker, marginal and respected. He also became a beloved educator at SUNY Purchase. His familial legacy left him with pangs of unease regarding his inability to accumulate wealth and a facility with small talk and tennis. He was simultaneously envious of his more successful (ie: rich and famous) peers and so hopelessly rebellious there was no way he could ever have followed their paths. Most scandalously, he fell for Jewish girls, and eventually, while dying from cancer, even married one, the esteemed Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, with whom he’d shared decades-long romance marked by long absences and affairs with other women—Rogers was an unlikely yet prodigious Don Juan. He died in 2001 at the age of 56.

Rogers was undoubtedly a man of many curious and contradictory qualities, but those listed above are the ones that linger with me after seeing The Windmill Movie (2009). It’s a strange and fascinating artifact: a memoir by proxy, an 80-minute essay constructed from some 200 hours of material shot or collected by Rogers with the vague intention of being either a self-portrait or a critique of the culture that spawned him. Maybe, inevitably, both. It was produced by Meiselas and David Grubin, and directed, edited and written by Alexander Olch, a student of Rogers with a somewhat similar background and a sense of kinship strong enough to encourage Olch to compose narration in Rogers’ voice. Watching The Windmill Movie, you can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t all designed this way, if only unconsciously. Keep in mind: though you may not have heard of him, Rogers was a prolific, hard-working, at times very personal filmmaker—not a dilettante. So if he never finished his Windmill, even when diagnosed with a terminal illness, it might be that he never truly planned to. It’s someone else’s Movie now, someone else’s portrait, though still suitably subjective, poetic, uneven, uncertain, and shot through with lust, indecision, and existential doubt. It’s available this week on DVD from Zeitgeist.

Remarkable images reappear throughout The Windmill Movie, as though circling Rogers’ psyche. Hands at a garden party, the corner of a sail brushing reeds, pretty young bronzed thighs on bicycles or beach blankets: one of the possible themes of Rogers’ project was summertime, the feeling that important things happen in this seemingly most leisurely of seasons. Rogers recalls being taken to the beach as a child and falling in love with other people’s mothers. He reflects on his own mother, abandoned by his father. She appears before his camera, in old age, wearing a wig, at one point shoveling dirt into a car. You imagine her sharing cocktails with reclusive socialite Edie Beale, made famous in the Maysle Brothers’ Grey Gardens (75) and a Hamptons neighbour.

Olch’s assembly is respectful, but not too respectful. He doesn’t flatter Rogers. He understands the perils in making a film about a filmmaker struggling to make a film about a dead filmmaker struggling to make a film, and thus grounds The Windmill Movie in specific memories and encounters, successes and failures. Some of Olch’s additions don’t entirely work. Rogers’ old friend, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn shows up, reads aloud some of Rogers’ musings, and finally feels underused, present mostly as a talisman. But for the most part Olch finds ways to honour his subject while establishing his own voice. There’s little in The Windmill Movie to indicate Rogers’ accomplishments as a filmmaker (nor is this film the place for it), but thankfully Zeitgeist has included two really wonderful shorts by Rogers: ‘Elephants: Fragments of an Argument’ (73) and ‘226-1690’ (84), which chronicles a year in Rogers’ life via views from his New York apartment window and messages left on his answering machine.

Parallel lives: Allen Shawn's Twin

Twin (Viking, $32.50) is the second memoir from Allen Shawn. His first, entitled Wish I Could Be There, was a personal investigation into phobias, of which Shawn admits to possessing several. Here, picking up from themes developed in the earlier book, Shawn explores the nature of his relationship to his autistic twin sister, Mary, who was removed from the family home at eight, and has since lived in various institutions designed to assist those with similar disabilities. Allen and Mary are now in their early 60s and visit regularly, yet it’s clear that the familiarity and comfort they enjoy in each other’s presence remains accompanied by profound, sometimes troubling mysteries of identity and perception seemingly inherent in their very coexistence. “It wasn’t until I reached middle age,” Shawn writes, “that I could even begin to acknowledge that being Mary’s twin was a central fact, perhaps the central fact, of my life.”

Shawn is the brother of actor and playwright Wallace Shawn and the son of long-time New Yorker editor William Shawn. He’s forged a career as a composer and teacher, though I’m far more familiar with his brother’s plays and memorable performances in Woody Allen movies or My Dinner With Andre. However, reading Twin, it becomes immediately apparent that however talented he may be in the discipline to which he’s devoted much of his life, Shawn is, like his brother, an immensely gifted writer. He displays a knack for transitioning between personal storytelling and essaying on science and history, weaving these elements into a seamless whole by way of an articulate yet arrestingly frank voice. It’s rare to encounter a book as emotionally involving from its first page as Twin—though it bears mentioning that that first page also features a joke about Mormon heaven that made me laugh out loud, and an amusing analogy between deep feelings of loss and the worry one might suffer over a vanishing pair of pants.

Allen Shawn

One chapter begins with a compelling defense of agnosticism, of acknowledging the value of religious feeling even if one isn’t inclined to value religion. This speaks to Shawn’s restless questioning and unsettledness, a fundamental aspect of his psychological makeup that no doubt feeds his continued desire to understand Mary’s inner life while never presuming that such understanding could ever be complete or even accurate. Shawn interrogates the moments in his life where he believes he may have come closest to experiencing something akin to Mary’s state of being, such as a fever-induced out-of-body experience he once endured as a child, or the feeling of being transported that comes with listening to or especially composing music. “Perhaps the closest I can come to understanding her inner life,” Shawn writes, “is when I am sick, or exhausted, or anxious, or exhilarated, or have taken a drug that changes what I hear and see and feel. Such moments at least suggest that there are different ways of perceiving and being.”

The Shawn family was unusually secretive, founded on a parental relationship at once brimming with kindness and even romance and defined in part by William Shawn’s romantic partnership with another woman, which continued concurrent to his marriage and lasted 40 years, ending only with his death. “We are a very bright, attractive and unusual family,” Shawn’s mother once told the medical staff of one of Mary’s homes. She rather hilariously compared her family to the Kennedys. Shawn doesn’t mock or take sides with either of his parents, but wonders how their complicated dynamic affected and was affected by Mary’s condition. He also comes to terms with their varied methods of accepting Mary’s separation, and his own lingering guilt. Shawn’s writing conveys such bravery and insight that it can only serve to remind us just how painfully long it can take to begin peeling back the veils enveloping our families and inherited legacies. He relates how in his final years his father once stated: “They made a big mistake making life so short.” Ain’t that the truth. But would it ever be long enough to settle such questions once and for all?