Entertainment

DIRT-FREE DOCU ON DIRECTOR

HE hated his family and loved women. Those are the two bits of information that stick in my mind after watching “The Windmill Movie,” a warm portrait of the fascinating Richard P. Rogers, an experimental filmmaker.

For decades, Rogers had worked on a filmed autobiography, but he was never able to finish it.

When he died of cancer in 2001, his widow, photographer Susan Meiselas, asked one of his former students, Alexander Olch, to go through 200 hours of her husband’s film and video, going back to material made by Rogers’ father in the 1930s.

Asked at one point why he never completed his masterwork, Rogers said: “Because I probably had to face myself, and I didn’t want to.”

Much of the footage by Rogers was of his upper-class WASP relatives at their Hamptons estate. He made no secret of the fact that he wished to escape them, but couldn’t. (His domineering mother, who looks like a “Grey Gardens” character, once threw her son and Susan out of the house on the Fourth of July for some minor fault.)

He also loved to film women — from pretty young things riding bikes or lounging on the beach to the many women he courted, remarking that he always seemed to be juggling two relationships at a time.

Olch doesn’t dish any dirt, although I imagine there’s lots. But “The Windmill Movie” is fine just the way it is.

It will be preceded at Film Forum by “Quarry,” a 12-minute ode to a swimming hole that Rogers made in 1970.

THE WINDMILL MOVIE

An unfinished life.

Running time: 82 minutes. Not rated (nudity). At Film Forum, Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue.