Making On the Bowery

70 years ago, in 1956, Lionel Rogosin made On the Bowery, a landmark of American cinema and a key work in the revival of American independent filmmaking. Rogosin conceived On the Bowery as an attempt to bring together two traditions that had profoundly inspired him: Robert Flaherty’s poetic realism and the Italian neorealism of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. His first encounter with Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) as a child left him, in his words, with a feeling “similar to the reaction a Siberian nomad would have had upon his first view of the ocean; awe and disbelief.” As he later wrote, his aim was “to find a way between the poetic realism of Flaherty and the narrative form of De Sica to a semi-fictional style solidly grounded in authentic realism.”

To develop this method, Rogosin spent months immersed in the Bowery, a notorious neighbourhood beneath New York’s famous elevated railway, which was being demolished around the time the film was made, observing its streets, bars, flophouses and missions, without initially knowing what form the film would take. “I began, using Flaherty as a guide by exploring the Bowery and all of its aspects.” His encounters gradually led him to Gorman Hendricks, who became his guide, and to the small, unorthodox crew he assembled through his Greenwich Village connections, including writer Mark Sufrin and cameraman Dick Bagley. When Bagley asked Rogosin what he had in mind, Rogosin pointed to the Rembrandt portraits covering his walls and simply said, “THAT”. The bristled faces in On the Bowery tell the real story. They’re portraits from what a priest in the film calls “the saddest and maddest street in the world.” Together with Sufrin and Bagley, Rogosin developed the film’s basic storyline, while leaving the dialogue to emerge from the lives and memories of its non-professional cast.

The texts gathered here return to this formative period in Rogosin’s career: to his influences, his encounters on the Bowery, his collaborators and his search for a cinematic language. The collection coincides with the retrospective of Rogosin’s films at CINEMATEK, presented in collaboration with Sabzian.

Many thanks to Michael Ariel Rogosin.