Richard P. Rogers

Pictures from a Revolution

Susan Meiselas, Richard P. Rogers

In 1981, Susan Meiselas published "Nicaragua, June 1978 to July 1979," 70 photographs she took documenting the Sandanista revolution. Ten years later, Meiselas returns looking for the people who appear in the photographs: where are they now, what do they remember, what do they think of their country and of the revolution? She finds a woman who buried her husband when she was 14; she talks to those who fought the Guarda Nacional - some are disillusioned, some still have the fervor of revolution; she talks to mothers about their sons; she finds a Guarda member who became a Contra. And she offers her own reflections on time and history and on the moment and meaning of a photograph.

American Experience: A Midwife's Tale

Richard P. Rogers

Kaiulani Lee, Andrew Elvis Miller

A docudrama adaptation of Ulrich's Pulitzer-winning book, which was based on thousands of entries in the journal of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, in the late 1700's and early 1800's. The movie intercuts between reenactments of Ballard doing her Maine midwifery and related tasks, and Ulrich in her eight years of research on her book; in the end, clear comparisons are made between the work of the two women.

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Richard P. Rogers

Rogers created this "minimalist soap opera" out of messages left on his telephone answering machine over the course of an entire year. Together with the accompanying visuals of scenes shot from the windows of the filmmaker’s New York loft, the recordings provide an amusing account of life caught between the public and the private; we see weddings take place in the church across the street, passersby struggling through the snow on the sidewalk, and gradually become submerged in the meditative rhythms of Rogers’s interior world.

Reality's Invisible

Robert Fulton

Rudolf Arnheim, Stan Brakhage

Fulton made the film during his brief time at Harvard, where he had been invited to teach by Robert Gardner, his friend and collaborator (Fulton would later serve as a cinematographer on Gardner’s 1981 documentary Deep Hearts, among others). Reality’s Invisible could be described as a portrait of the Carpenter Center, yet it is a portrait of an extremely idiosyncratic and distinctive sort. Fulton moves us through the concrete space of the Center’s Le Corbusier-designed building—the only structure by the architect in North America—but, more centrally, presents us footage of students making and discussing their work alongside figures like Gardner, theorist Rudolf Arnheim, artist Stan Vanderbeek, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and graphic designer Toshi Katayama.

The Windmill Movie

Alexander Olch

Richard P. Rogers, Wallace Shawn

Filmmaker Richard P. Rogers tried for twenty years to make a documentary about his own life. He died in 2001, leaving the project unfinished, until his widow, acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas, commissioned his former student Alexander Olch to make a film out of the pieces. Starting in the Hamptons, in the town of Wainscott, the film weaves Rogers' footage into a journey through childhood memories, a less than encouraging mother, a family background of privilege, and Rogers' persistent, dogged attempts to document his own life. Rogers' friend, actor and writer Wallace Shawn, joins in the process, as the film investigates the differences between documentary and fiction, and tells the tragic story of Rogers' life.

Living At Risk

Susan Meiselas, Richard P. Rogers

Originally broadcast on PBS, the film features the Barrios, a middle-class family both activated and fractured by the conflict. Instead of fleeing their country, the siblings are guided by a religious and socialist desire to help those most vulnerable and destitute, mostly peasants in the rural areas.

Quarry

Richard P. Rogers

This portrait of an abandoned quarry in Quincy, Massachusetts, captures the striking natural beauty of the site as it explores the social rites of the young people who gather along its rugged shores to create leisure in what was once a place of toil. -Harvard Film Archive