Precisely 70 years ago, Lionel Rogosin made On the Bowery, one of the most important documentaries of the revival of American cinema. Now that the entirety of his films has been restored, Sabzian and CINEMATEK invite you to rediscover the filmography of this radical and pacifist filmmaker.
After studying chemistry at Yale, Lionel Rogosin became an engineer and served in the Navy during the Second World War. He returned deeply shaken by the horrors of the front and decided to leave his position in the family business to devote himself to exposing injustice through cinema. Influenced both by Flaherty’s Man of Aran and by Italian neorealism, he set out to make a film about the Apartheid regime. Keen to develop and refine a method, he conceived his first film, On the Bowery, which won an award in Venice. His style was characterised by immersion in a particular milieu and by scenes re-enacted by non-professional performers, with fiction serving as a means of accessing reality. His approach, then almost unheard of in American cinema, was noticed by Jonas Mekas, with whom he helped foster the emergence of the New American Cinema Group.
Building on this experience, he made Come Back, Africa, a hard-hitting work filmed clandestinely in a South African township. Telling the story of a family victimised by racial segregation, the film also introduced the singer Miriam Makeba, whom Rogosin would help into exile. Despite its impact, the film struggled to find a screen. Rogosin then decided to reopen an empty cinema in Manhattan, creating the Bleecker Street Cinema, which became a legendary venue for experimental and repertory cinema.
He moved towards an experimental practice in order to denounce the Vietnam War in his only feature film of the 1960s, Good Times, Wonderful Times. With no distributor interested in the film, Lionel Rogosin founded Impact Films in 1965 to distribute it alongside other activist films of the period.
At the dawn of the 1970s, Lionel Rogosin devoted three films to racism in the United States: Black Roots, which explores the subject through musicians; Black Fantasy, which tackles the delicate subject of interracial couples and bears the formal influence of New York’s underground cinema; and Woodcutters of the Deep South, which examines the working conditions of Alabama lumberjacks.
Finally, in Arab-Israeli Dialogue, he captured the meeting he organised at his cinema between Israeli artist and writer Amos Kenan and Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein. Lionel Rogosin always linked his fight against injustice to a self-reflexive approach, placing himself among his subjects, ultimately bringing his career to a close by opening up a debate to which he was personally and intimately connected.
This retrospective has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of Milestone Films, which restored the entirety of Lionel Rogosin’s films in partnership with the Cineteca di Bologna, as well as the enthusiasm of Michael Rogosin. His work tracing his father’s legacy has resulted, alongside the restorations, in the making of a documentary for each of the films being screened, as well as the feature-length film You Never Know, which will receive its world premiere on 28 November in CINEMATEK. The programme is complemented by an exhibition of previously unseen documents, photographs and moving images from the filmmaker’s personal archives, made available by his son.
The full programme can be found here.
Image: On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin, 1956) | © Michael Ariel Rogosin