Word: rogosin
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Come Back, Africa. Filmed in secret and crude in craftsmanship, Lionel (On the Bowery) Rogosin's candid-camera movie manages a fairminded, matter-of-fact look at a modern nightmare: the black depths of South African society...
Come Back, Africa. Filmed in secret and crude in craftsmanship, Lionel (On the Bowery) Rogosin's candid-camera movie manages a fairminded, matter-of-fact look at a modern nightmare: the black depths of South African society...
Nevertheless, Rogosin finds beauty in South Africa, too, most of it in the vital faces of the Negro population, in their sunburst smiles and roars of laughter, in the explosive imagination of their dances, and above all in the sheer demonic genius of their music. All Rogosin's candid-camera work is done with impressive skill and sensitivity. Where the director has trouble is in the acted action. Almost all his players are amateurs, and he has obviously tried to make them relax and act natural; but except in one exciting bull session among Negro intellectuals, most of them...
Moviemaker Rogosin, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer (Beaunit Mills), made Come Back, Africa (the title is a translation of an African National Congress slogan) mostly at his own expense, and the film altogether cost close to $70,000. He entered South Africa as a tourist, lived there for almost a year before he felt ready to roll his cameras. In April 1958 he applied for government permission to make "a musical travelogue." After two months of palaver with six suspicious federal bureaus, Rogosin got his permit. He dashed off his script in less than a week, then shot...
Released in Europe, the film has earned good reviews and a modest amount of money. But in Manhattan, though several exhibitors liked the picture, they had no theater for it. Nothing daunted, Moviemaker Rogosin took a three-year lease on the Bleecker Street Theater in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where Come Back, Africa has now been running for two weeks to small but steadily growing audiences...