Anthropology and Cinema: Visual Representations of Human Rights, Displacement and Resistance in Come Back Africa, by Lionel Rogosin

Abstract

This article is devoted to reevaluating the anthropological importance of the work of Lionel Rogosin, whose films, like those of Jean Rouch and Robert Flaherty before him, reflect a symbiosis between cinema and visual research. Focused on apartheid, civil rights, and displacement, his filmmaking activity includes such important titles as Come Back Africa [2004], on the apartheid in South Africa during the 1950s, and On the Bowery [1956], located in inner-city New York in the 1960s. I believe his work should be positioned within anthropology and cinema, and analyzed for use of an approach of the “participant camera.”