The Sag Harbor Cinema’s “Projections” series was created in 2021 to draw attention to the work of East End nonprofit organizations and cultural initiatives by using its building, network, and digital services. Among those groups is the Wainscott Heritage Project, whose goal is to preserve the hamlet’s history and cultural character.
In partnership with the heritage project, the cinema will present “Wainscott Reframed: Narratives of Place and Preservation” on Sunday morning at 11. The free program will feature a 35-millimeter screening of “The Windmill Movie” that will be followed by a conversation exploring Wainscott’s history.
Directed by Alexander Olch, “The Windmill Movie” (2008) grew out of an autobiographical film that Richard P. Rogers, a documentary and experimental filmmaker and director of the Film Study Center at Harvard, had been working on for nearly two decades but never finished.
After Rogers’s death in 2001 at the age of 57, his wife, the acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas, asked Olch, a former student of her husband’s, to create a film from the footage Rogers had taken. Beginning in Wainscott, the film considers memory, authorship, and the act of constructing an image of a life, according to the cinema. The 35-millimeter print is from Olch’s personal collection.
After the screening, Meiselas, who is president of the Magnum Foundation and a producer of “The Windmill Movie,” will be joined for a conversation by Esperanza Leon, the president of the Wainscott Heritage Project and director of education and community engagement at LongHouse Reserve, and Andrew Fierberg, a founding board member of the cinema and a co-producer of the film. Mark Lubell, the cinema’s executive director, will moderate the discussion, which will focus on Wainscott’s past and how it can inform its future. The speakers will take questions afterward.
The film weaves Rogers’s footage into an exploration of childhood memories, a less than encouraging mother, a family background of privilege, and his attempts to document his own life. Wallace Shawn, the actor and writer, who was a friend of the filmmaker, takes part in the process as the film investigates the differences between documentary and fiction.
“I always hoped that the Wainscott community would have access to the rich archive of local history Dick created there,” said Meiselas. “Bringing the film into conversation with Wainscott Heritage Project gives us an opportunity to look again at that history and consider what it means for the community today.”
“ ‘The Windmill Movie’ captures how deeply a place can shape memory and identity,” said Leon. “It underscores how fragile our history can be if we don’t document and protect it, echoing the mission of Wainscott Heritage Project to protect our rapidly shifting landscape where iconic viewsheds, historic structures, and open fields face intense development. As we bring our community together for this screening and dialogue, we are reminded that reclaiming our local narrative is the first step toward saving the historic character of the place we call home.”
“Projections” was created by Bill Collage, the chairman of the cinema’s education committee, and is led by Meghan McGinley Arnone, its director of education and grants management.
