Lionel Rogosin; Made Films With Political Edge

Lionel Rogosin, a political filmmaker whose cutting-edge documentaries received wide critical praise but scant support at the American box office, died Friday in Los Angeles.

Rogosin was 76 and died of a heart attack while taking an early morning walk near his home, said his son Daniel, of Los Angeles.

In such films as “On the Bowery,” “Come Back, Africa,” and “Good Times, Wonderful Times,” Rogosin raised the stakes of documentary filmmaking with his highly personal vision.

The late John Cassavetes, no stranger to cutting-edge filmmaking, once called Rogosin “probably the greatest documentary filmmaker of all time.” A Newsweek critic called him “a man of profound humanism.”

Born in New York, the son of an industrialist, Rogosin grew up in privilege on Long Island. The darkness of the Depression years and the specter of fascism in Europe were not lost on him, however, and would eventually fuel a progressive political bent and film style.

After serving during World War II as an engineer on a Navy minesweeper off the coast of Trinidad, he returned to Yale to finish his course work in engineering. Upon graduation, Rogosin found work as a chemical engineer and pursued that work into his early 30s, when he decided he wanted to make films.

His first film, “On the Bowery,” is a gritty look at the harsh reality of life on New York’s skid row. Critics said the 1956 film reflected the alienation in American society at mid-century.

Writing in the Saturday Review, Arthur Knight called it “an extraordinary documentary filled with an overwhelming sense of veracity and an unvoiced compassion for the men who have surrendered their dignity to a drink.”

The film was nominated for an Academy Award, and won the grand prize for documentary film at the Venice Film Festival and a British Film Academy award. It was selected as one of the best films of the 1950s by the film library of the Museum of Modern Art.

Chronicle of Apartheid

His next film, “Come Back, Africa,” was perhaps his most challenging to make. It was filmed in 1959, decades ahead of the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, while Rogosin’s crew worked in secret after getting permission from the government to make a harmless musical. And although “Come Back, Africa” contains the songs of a then-obscure singer named Miriam Makeba, it is anything but a light, frothy musical.

One of the first documentary films to deal with the harsh realities of apartheid, the picture tells the story of a Zulu family that is forced out of its village by famine. The family moves into a crumbling cottage on the outskirts of Johannesburg and learns the grim realities of city life, restrictive pass laws that limit the husband’s ability to find work, and continual police harassment.

Critics again responded positively to the film. Time magazine selected it one of the top 10 pictures of 1960. A New York Post critic wrote: “If you want to see and understand South Africa, there is no better way than this picture of Johannesburg.”

In the mid-1960s, Rogosin turned his attention to horrors of warfare, with the antiwar documentary “Good Times, Wonderful Times.”

Released in the United States in 1968, the film defused the sensory overload of the continual Vietnam War images being shown at that time because Rogosin framed his war footage around scenes of a cocktail party in London. “War is inevitable,” one woman at the party says. “ . . . If one looks at the world--war is one way of keeping the population down.”

A Newsweek critic called it “a passionately pacifist document, an indictment of human indifference to inhuman destruction, a call to action, a warning and a punch in the soft underbelly of society.”

Rogosin, who spoke eloquently against the Vietnam War, and his film were popular attractions on college campuses in the late 1960s.

Later films included “Black Roots, Black Fantasy,” “Wood Cutters of the Deep South,” which dealt with racial injustice in America and, finally, “Arab Israeli Dialogue” in the mid-1970s.

Rogosin also supported experimental and avante-garde filmmaking as the owner of the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York’s Greenwich Village, one of the most prominent film art houses in the nation. Rogosin sold the theater, which he opened in 1962, in the early 1970s and it finally closed in 1990.

Influential Abroad

At the time of his death, Rogosin was working on an oral history of anti-apartheid revolutionaries in South Africa.

In an interview with the New York Times some years ago, Rogosin noted that his films were more influential around the world than in America.

“It’s funny, but internationally my films are well-known,” he said. “And even influential. ‘Come Back, Africa,’ for example has been shown all over Africa . . . and I’ve been told by African filmmakers that it influenced and started the whole cinema movement there.

“That’s rewarding, to know that you’ve influenced an entire continent’s movie making.”

Rogosin is survived by another son, Michael, of Angers, France; and three grandchildren.

Funeral service will be held Tuesday at 10 a.m. at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood.