Lionel Rogosin, Between Empathy and Outrage

With On the Bowery under his belt, Rogosin arrived in South Africa in the spring of 1957 on a tourist visa, and cautiously made entreaties with leaders in the anti-apartheid movement. Through his contacts, Rogosin met Black South African journalists Bloke Modisane and Lewis Nkosi. Both worked with Rogosin to construct the narrative of Come Back, Africa; as with On the Bowery, dialogue was improvised by the participants. In an interview in the 1990s, Rogosin stressed the centrality of Modisane and Nkosi to the film’s development and downplayed his own role. He recalled telling the men, “It’s your film, it’s your story. I’m just here. I’m just your media.” Nkosi facilitated much of the casting by bringing Rogosin to Sophiatown. The director stumbled upon Zachariah at a train station and persuaded him to participate—even as he understandably feared it was a police set-up. White participants were drawn from Johannesburg anti-apartheid activist circles.

An opening series of shots establishing Johannesburg’s cityscape give way to a group of Black men arriving in the city. The camera quickly draws the eye to Zachariah, just “one of hundreds of thousands of Africans forced each year off the land by the regime and into the gold mines,” according to a title card. Come Back, Africa follows him as he drifts from one job to the next—laborer, garage attendant, waiter (a brief stint as a household servant to a wealthy white couple anticipates Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl). Zachariah is thwarted by restrictive laws and racial hostility everywhere he turns; yet he persists, bearing each indignity in turn. When he is ultimately faced with gutting tragedy, Zachariah wails, squeals, throws plates, and furiously pounds his fists. His boiling anger, and Rogosin’s with it, is made visceral.

This concluding moment also demonstrates Rogosin’s appreciation for the selective impact of editing and montage, a preview of tactics that would define his next feature, Good Times, Wonderful Times (1965). As Zachariah seethes, Rogosin quickly crosscuts between him and laborers wielding pickaxes, disembarking from trains, and working in the mines. The noise of his wails and fists carry over the images to be met in the final moments by the rhythmic pounding of a drum. This visual and sonic arrangement underscores society’s indifference to the individual suffering of others and the continuing exploitative system of apartheid. Zachariah’s story, Rogosin reminds us, is just one of many.

While Rogosin’s status as a white American in South Africa afforded him distinct privileges, he and his small production crew nevertheless engaged in considerable subterfuge to complete the picture. At various points in Come Back, Africa’s development the director told authorities he was making a travelogue for an airline, a film about the Boer War, and a documentary about African music. To support this final claim, Rogosin shot hundreds of feet of film of penny whistlers, gumboot dancers, and singing and dancing among Black residents of Sophiatown to show the Department of Interior; it’s thanks to this alibi that the heaviness of Come Back, Africa’s politics is tempered by joyous moments of song, dance, and physical movement that project the resilience of a marginalized community. An extended sequence with mobile camera work of Zachariah and his wife walking through a community celebration is a highlight, as is Miriam Makeba’s singing in the shebeen where Zachariah drowns his sorrows. Makeba’s singular talent inspired Rogosin to pay her way out of South Africa so she could promote the film with him in Europe. The trip facilitated her ascent to international stardom.

Both On the Bowery and Come Back, Africa garnered considerable acclaim on the European festival circuit. They were admired by an emerging vanguard of young American filmmakers such as John Cassavetes, Jonas Mekas, and Shirley Clarke. Come Back, Africa is also said to have had a wide impact on the generation of African auteurs who would begin to emerge in the 1960s and ’70s. Meeting Rogosin in 1969, Sembène would tell the director, “for us in Africa, your film has embodied the problems and preoccupations of this continent.”

All the while, Rogosin struggled to secure commercial distribution, even in a city like New York with an established art-house culture. He ultimately pooled investors and secured a long-term lease on a Greenwich Village movie house in 1960, where Come Back, Africa was the inaugural showing. The Bleecker Street Cinema became a bastion of downtown cinephile culture. Rogosin’s frustration with the American movie scene was shared by many artistically minded peers; he was present at meetings convened by Mekas that inaugurated the New American Cinema Group.

Leaving Bleecker Street in the able hands of his theater manager, Rogosin decamped to London in 1961 for his next project—an impassioned rallying call for nuclear disarmament. The resulting film, Good Times, Wonderful Times, shows Rogosin beginning to experiment beyond the docudrama format. What emerges is a curious hybrid: staged party scenes mixed with archival footage reassembled through associational editing in the tradition of Sergei Eisenstein. The film opens on a Swinging Sixties cocktail party, eventually settling upon two attendees who drunkenly laugh as their idle chatter turns to the threat of war. Their guffaws give way to the sound of a bomb exploding followed by images of nuclear fallout and its human causalities in Japan. This establishes a pattern for the rest of the film, with Rogosin relentlessly cutting back and forth between the party and sobering archival footage of World War II–era atrocities. The message behind Rogosin’s didactic editing is clear: he is indicting the partygoers for their glib indifference to warfare, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and human suffering, a pointed criticism with rising urgency at a time when U.S. involvement in Vietnam was intensifying. If On the Bowery exudes Rogosin’s quiet empathy for the dispossessed, and Come Back, Africa raises his frustration to a crescendo, Good Times, Wonderful Times aggressively launches his indignation in all directions.

Rogosin channeled his previous experience with nonactors into orchestrating the party scenes. Participants included the editor of a British woman’s magazine, the head of an advertising agency, and a Manchester businessman. In a self-reflexive turn, Rogosin also appears periodically as a carefree partygoer. An artist, Molly Parkin, was enlisted as a foil to the cast’s business types and instructed to serve as a “catalyst” for conversation. As the film progresses, she draws out and even challenges some of the more outlandish political statements made by her fellow revelers. It is unclear to what extent the partygoers were witting or unwitting subjects (this potentially unfair treatment prompted Andrew Sarris to pan the film in the Village Voice in 1966), but Parkin’s ability to provoke uncomfortable dialogue anticipates the cringe reality comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen and Nathan Fielder, once again demonstrating Rogosin’s acumen in finding figures through which he could mold reality for his own imaginative purposes.

With Vietnam protests rising, Rogosin returned to the United States anticipating interest from distributors. He was again disappointed. Rogosin opted to self-distribute the film; by the end of the decade, he estimated that more than one million college students nationwide had seen the film. After the completion of Good Times, Wonderful Times, Rogosin continued experimenting with form, including two brief forays into comedy in 1966 (How Do You Like Them Bananas?, Oysters Are in Season). With his own finances depleted, Rogosin would never again independently finance his own new works, even as John Cassavetes proclaimed him “probably the greatest documentary filmmaker of all time” in a 1969 interview.

By the dawn of the 1970s, the American independent film landscape had fundamentally changed. Rogosin’s brand of “molding reality” had fallen out of favor, usurped by Direct Cinema’s fly-on-the-wall spontaneity and unscripted approach. This paradigm shift in documentary theory and style dovetailed with an aesthetic of realism pursued in independent feature films by young filmmakers like Cassavetes. Rogosin’s last four documentaries were all funded by European television. In these works, we see him making use of interviews or having subjects speak candidly before the camera, techniques Rogosin had eschewed in his earlier works. It is worth speculating whether these approaches were mandated by his producers to fit specific expository needs for foreign audiences or a creative decision befitting each project’s specific goals.

Three of these films center Black experience, circling back to the theme that drew Rogosin to filmmaking nearly two decades earlier. In the first, Black Roots (1970), Rogosin alternates interviews with African American activists and musicians with music performances and on-the-fly footage of men, women, and children enjoying their time outdoors. With its juxtaposition of candid discussions of racism with music and smiling faces, Black Roots harkens back to the rhythms and preoccupations of Come Back, Africa.

Coming as they did in the early 1970s, his subsequent two films interrogate the achievements—and limitations—of the civil rights era. In Black Fantasy (1972), Rogosin provocatively explores police brutality and taboo sexual politics through the figure of Black civil rights activist Jim Collier, who is married to a white woman. Built around Collier’s improvised dialogue, Black Fantasy is the most direct callback among Rogosin’s later films to the enacted modes of his best-known works. It is also—alongside Good Times, Wonderful Times—his most aesthetically confrontational, here deploying slow motion and concussive music in scenes of brutal physical assault on Collier and discomfiting talking-head interviews on interracial desire. It is a challenging work to watch in 2024, eliciting complex feelings, particularly considering Rogosin’s positionality as a white filmmaker. Rogosin’s final documentary about American racial relations, Woodcutters of the Deep South (1973), has aged more admirably. Here Rogosin trains his camera on the thorny interracial and interpersonal dynamics among Black and white woodsmen forming a labor cooperative in the Deep South. The film balances observational footage of the men at work cutting trees and pulp with interviews with Black and white workers. What rises to the surface are lingering racial divides that underline the unfinished promises of desegregation and interracial democracy.

Rogosin’s final film—of gut-wrenching interest given current events—is Arab Israeli Dialogue (1974), a recording of a heated discussion between exiled Palestinian poet Rashed Hussein and Israeli writer Amos Kenan, sparked by the previous year’s Arab-Israeli War and filmed in the basement of the Bleecker Street Cinema. In the year of that film’s release, Rogosin was forced to sell Bleecker Street Cinema. Soon after, he shuttered his production company. He turned to writing in the 1980s and toyed with ideas for future films that never came to pass before his death in 2000.

A man of mid-twentieth-century U.S. liberal values, Lionel Rogosin was a filmmaker fueled by deeply felt political ideals. Through his lens, he documented, explored, and protested against his era’s most intractable problems—racism, economic inequality, military brinkmanship, geopolitical strife, alcoholism, homelessness, and more. His influence on documentary and fiction filmmaking quietly lingers. Collaborative scripting between filmmaker and subject has become a common practice in participatory documentary. Moreover, his loose scripting and use of improvised dialogue became hallmarks of a certain strain of low-budget indie filmmaking of the aughts. While he is best remembered for his groundbreaking 1950s works, a broader appraisal of his oeuvre unearths a greater aesthetic versatility. A true independent, Rogosin never settled on any one mode of documentary. His reinventions of nonfiction form confound categorization, even as the intractable political problems of Rogosin’s age continue to vex us today.