Word: rogosin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Come Back, Africa (Lionel Rogosin Films) is a timely and remarkable piece of cinema journalism: a matter-of-fact, horrifying study of life in the black depths of South African society. Filmed in secret by a 36-year-old moviemaker named Lionel (On the Bowery) Rogosin, who worked in constant danger of arrest and deportation, Come Back, Africa is necessarily crude in craftsmanship. But Rogosin's camera looks deep into the private nightmare and social desperation of a man and a people...
Dramatically, the end of the film is false, but statistically it is true; rape and murder are commonplace in South Africa's black ghettos. Indeed, Director Rogosin's reading of the facts is conservative. He is scrupulously fair to the whites, and the camera leans over backward to avoid some of the more unpleasant aspects of life in the Johannesburg slums: the open sewers and the unchecked disease. But Rogosin shows enough squalor to stun the average comfortable North American, and to prove beyond rebuttal one of his main points: that under the Nationalist oppression, black...
...Bowery (Lionel Rogosin). Alcohol is a religion, and one of its best-known shrines is a street and a district in Lower East Side Manhattan known as the Bowery.* There, in the long shadow of the skyscraping spires of success, the faithful make perpetual libation to failure. Day and night the staggering crowds of petes and winos, toads and loners mill about in a hundred sticks and arms and muskie stands (as the bars on Skid Row are variously described), and keep the dismal watches of the dark night of the soul. A trite and cheaply sensational subject...
...technique is documentary. Producer Lionel Rogosin, a 33-year-old textile magnate who quit as president of Beaunit Mills to make this movie, shot every foot of it on the scummy sidewalks and in the smelly bars of the Bowery itself. The main character is a 42-year-old, self-admitted Bowery bum named Ray Salyer (who recently refused a $40,000 contract offered by a Hollywood producer with the comment: "I just want to be left alone . . . There's nothing else in life but the booze"). Since the picture was completed, two of the principal supporting players have...
...took Rogosin 18 months and cost $60,000, including drinks for the cast. By the end of 1955 he had 100,000 feet of film, trenchantly photographed by Richard Bagley (The Quiet One). All this has been sensitively cut by Carl Lerner into a 65-minute movie that promises the safe delights of slumming but carries the, spectator into scenes that will sear his eyeballs like a splash of rotgut...