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.

The Original of Laura: pieces of a man

“Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what contemporary descriptions of intercourse so seldom convey…”

—from The Original of Laura

Its weight in your hands approximates that of someone’s remains. It contains the unfinished work of a dying man mediating on physical things, so there’s plenty of sex and a sense of proximity to death all the more unnerving for its relentless playfulness. It’s one of these posthumously published puzzles pulled from the fire, but to my nose smells nothing like literary betrayal nor crass cash-in. Take a look at its thick, largely blank pages: no one could mistake this for anything other than what it is: an art object; an homage; a glorious sketch. It leaves us wanting more, as it should. This “novel in fragments” doesn’t even hold all the fragments necessary to make a whole book—not even a third, I’d guess. But what remains of its narrative ambitions is also something about fragments, about the body as Death’s construction site, or rather demolition zone, a place where fragments of a person can be stolen or actually willed away, piece by piece, in this case from the feet up. There’s another title, not on the jacket but inside: Dying is Fun. I’m not sure if I buy this assertion, but if anyone could transform such irony into articulated desire it would’ve been Vladimir Nabokov.

I stalled an awfully long time on reading The Original of Laura (Knopf, $42), feeling that perhaps I should wait until I’ve read everything else by Nabokov—still working on that one!—uncertain as to how this artifact should be approached. The book came out one year ago and I’m only now finally reporting on it, feeling silly for my trepidation. It’s actually a pretty fun, fascinating read, and the context provided by the packaging and introduction is all the context anyone needs. It can’t be stated too clearly that this represents the roughest of, well, not even something we can call a draft, from an author whose prose is famous for its shining eloquence. But, as with say, the Bootleg Series recordings of Bob Dylan, this roughness, this exposure of process, is partly what’s so interesting to examine.

“Learning to use the vigor of the body for the purpose of its own deletion,” an wealthy, elderly, fat man considers science, writing, and his slow disappearance, as well as his longing for the young woman whose name rhymes with the one in the title. Flora recalls Margot from Laughter in the Dark and, quite obviously, the eponymous nymph of Lolita—she’s even molested as a child by an older man named Hubert H. Hubert. Her backstory is arguably the book’s most coherent section, and includes a suicide recorded on camera and a fatal stroke occurring in an elevator: “Going up, one would like to surmise.” The Original of Laura was the project undertaken by Nabokov during his final, sickly years in Montreux. It was clearly far from completion when he died in 1977, though his son Dmitri offers what seems to me a perfectly convincing case for its survival and publication in his painstakingly Nabakovian introduction, which possesses the faintest echo of Pale Fire, and in its concern with correcting legacy invokes The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

Designed by Chip Kidd, the cover emphasizes themes of disintegration and absence, with words fading to black before their termination. Nabokov’s text itself appears as facsimiles of the index cars upon which the author composed his works, the edges of which perforated, encouraging consumers to punch them out and perhaps rearrange them in some new order, though, jarring as many of the transitions may be, it’s hard to imagine an arrangement more satisfying than the one presented here. The Original of Laura is fractured and elliptical, a mere hint at something that might have been, peppered with sparks of the old brilliance in search of their final form, mischievously sculpted to make it almost seem intentional, and in precisely this way it’s kind of perfect.