- Lionel Rogosin
Lionel Rogosin (
January 22 ,1924 -December 8 ,2000 ) was a maverick American filmmaker who worked outside theHollywood system in the 1950s.Biography
Born and raised on the East Coast of the
United States , he was the only son ofIsrael Rogosin , one of the most eminent businessman-philanthropists in the textile industry. Lionel Rogosin attendedYale University and obtained a degree inchemical engineering in order to join his father's business. Extremely affected by World War Two, he volunteered and joined the Navy to fight war,fascism , andNazism . Upon his return, he spent his free time traveling in war-ridden Eastern andWestern Europe andIsrael , as well as a trip toAfrica in 1948. He then worked in his father's company until 1954, while teaching himself to film with a 16mmBolex camera. Deeply concerned with political issues includingracism and fascism, which to him were interconnected, Rogosin participated in aUnited Nations film called "Out", a documentary-style film about the plight of Hungarianrefugee s. Drastically changing his destiny and giving up a promising career, he decided to dedicate his life to promoting peace and confronting issues such as nuclear war,imperialism , and racism.Apartheid was his first target, but in order to make a film against it, he decided to learn by filming theBowery , New Yorkskid row , an effort influenced by the documentaries ofRobert J. Flaherty . Thus he made "On the Bowery" in 1955-1956 in the tradition of neo-realism. The film was the first American film to receive the Grand Prize for Documentary at theVenice Film Festival in 1956. It also received a British Academy Film Award in 1956 and was nominated for anAcademy Award .Armed with this successful experience, Rogosin was able to begin his fight against Apartheid. With a small crew, and under the pretense of making a commercial film on African music, he clandestinely documented the life of a black
South Africa nmigrant worker inJohannesburg . Completed in 1958 with non-professional actors and a young African singer namedMiriam Makeba , "Come Back, Africa " created a sensation at the Venice Film Festival, winning the critics' film award.Aware of the difficulties of distributing
independent film s in America, Rogosin founded and opened the Bleecker Street Cinema inNew York City in 1960. The Bleecker became one of the most important independent art houses in New York, along with the New Yorker Cinema, and a form of cinema university for emerging film makers such asMiloš Forman ,Francis Ford Coppola , and many critics and film lovers. In the same period he was a founding and active member of the New American Cinema movement along with Jonas andAdolfas Mekas ,Shirley Clarke , Bob Downey and many others, whose films were shown at the Bleecker Street Cinema.Between 1960 and 1965, Rogosin traveled the world to gather material for his anti-nuclear war film "Good Times, Wonderful Times", which was presented as the British entry at the Venice Film Festival in 1965. It was also shown at many American universities during the Vietnam War. Aware of the problems of distribution and production, Rogosin founded Impact Films in 1965 as a solution and distributed many political and independent films which couldn't have been distributed otherwise through the company. In 1965, Rogosin organized, along with others including
Bertrand Russell (a fan of "Good Times, Wonderful Times"), the "British Artists' Protest" in August 1965 and the "European Artists' Protest" in December 1965 against the Vietnam War.In 1966 he tried his hand at comedy by filming two zany, short, low-budget films called "How Do You Like Them Bananas" and "Oysters are in Season" while running the Bleecker Street Cinema and Impact Films.
In the 1970s, with rising financial difficulties, Rogosin made low-budget films supported by European television stations. Two of them, "Black Roots" and "Black Fantasy", dealt with economic and social hardships faced by blacks in America. He went on to make "Wood-cutters of the Deep South", about a black and white
cooperative , and finally "Arab-Israeli Dialogue", an attempt to give a voice and meeting ground to both parties through a discussion between aPalestinian poet and an Israeli journalist.Rogosin sold the Bleecker Street Theater in 1974 and brought Impact Films to an end in 1978. Though he continued to develop many film projects on subjects such as Navajo Indians,
police brutality ,Paul Gauguin , and a musical aboutstreet children inBrazil , he was never able to raise enough money to film them. Despite critical success in Europe and among other American independent filmmakers, he was by and large neither recognized nor supported in the USA. He moved to England in the 1980s where he turned to writing. His health deteriorating, he went back to Los Angeles in the late 1990s.He died in Los Angeles in December 2000.
Further reading
* [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1919855173 "Come Back, Africa", Lionel Rogosin & Peter Davis, STE Publishers, ISBN 1-919855-17-3 (The book of the film)]
* [http://www.lionelrogosin.com The Official Lionel Rogosin site]
* [http://www.nysun.com/article/29740 New York Sun review]
* [http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=10405 New York Times review]
* [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,826322,00.html 1960 Time magazine review - A Camera in Johannesburg]
* [http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC36folder/ComeBackAfrica.html Come Back Africa and South African film history]
* [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,895245,00.html 1961 Time magazine article - The best pictures of 1960]
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