The long involvement of the iconoclastic social activist Lionel Rogosin (1924 - 2000) with post-war American independent cinema went well beyond the parameters of his own filmmaking practice. His establishment of famed arthouse theater Bleecker Street Cinema in 1960 as a showcase for Underground films and his activities in international distribution - initially supplying material for ventures and pioneering London's new Cinema Club, all combined to sustain the wide interest he had first attracted for alternative filmmaking with the prize-winning reception of his 1955 feature On the Bowery at the Venice Film Festival of 1956.
A testament to the director's influence from neorealist cinema, On the Bowery maintains an authoritatively calculous narrative concerning a vagabond's encounters with street-life alcoholism and dereliction in New York's lower depths using non-professional actors, some of which were displaced and homeless. Come Back Africa (1959) was filmed in much the same method, though in large measure clandestinely among black South Africans that led lives of oppression due to the contemporaneous struggles of apartheid. A film that Martin Scorsese has cited 'a heroic film' and that it further 'captured the spirit embodied by Rogosin and his fellow artists ' Rogosin's remaining canon largely focused on the black experience in America, but the growing radicalism of their content blatant in his fourth release; Black Roots (1970) that traced developing militancy had been accompanied by an increasing conservatism of form.