Good Times, Wonderful Times: a film by Lionel Rogosin
A blistering condemnation of political complacency amidst nuclear armament and the Vietnam War
“These hard-drinkers, self-satisfied small-talkers, are we really like them?”
— Joseph Gelmis, Newsday, July 19, 1966
Lionel Rogosin’s Good Times, Wonderful Times (1965) is a biting critique of political complacency amidst nuclear armament and America’s escalating involvement in Vietnam. This message comes by way of sardonic visual and aural contrast where the idle chatter and swinging music of a London cocktail party is juxtaposed with bleak archival footage of nuclear devastation, fascism, concentration camps, and protest. This didactic mode of assemblage indicts the film’s frivolous partygoers for their tacit support of continued warfare and oppression. The urgency of its message prompted one critic to write: “[Rogosin] has managed brilliantly to set the present world—and the urgent questions of personal responsibility—teetering on the stem of a Martini.”
Good Times, Wonderful Times demonstrates Lionel Rogosin’s continued commitment to addressing themes rarely grappled with by mainstream cinema as evidenced by his better-known earlier works—the skid-row film On The Bowery (1956) and anti-apartheid masterwork Come Back Africa (1959). Disappointed by the limited release of the latter film in the United States, Rogosin set up shop in London for his next project, an attack on nuclear proliferation. Armed with letters of introduction from Bertrand Russell, Rogosin and his crew embarked on a several-year journey across Western Europe, the Soviet Bloc, and Asia to acquire newsreel, military, and other war footage from numerous (often uncooperative) government archives to be paired with their semi-documentary staging of a posh cocktail party. Awarded first prize at the Leipzig Documentary Festival and selected as Britain’s entry into 1965 Venice Film Festival, the film received a more muted response in the United States where political tensions forced the director to distribute the film himself via progressively-minded independent theaters and the burgeoning college campus circuit. Rogosin proudly claimed that over one million American students saw the documentary in its first year of release, galvanizing the youth antiwar movement in its crucial early stages. The film is a rarely seen gem of found footage filmmaking and biting critique of apathy in our tumultuous times. – Tanya Goldman.
Digital projection courtesy of Milestone Films.
el Rogosin (1924-2000) committed his career to addressing some of the most pressing issues of mid-twentieth century politics. Rogosin’s first major release was the Oscar-nominated On The Bowery (1956), a depiction of unemployment and homelessness on Manhattan’s skid row heavily influenced by Robert Flaherty and Italian Neorealism. He followed up in 1958 with Come Back Africa, a landmark anti-apartheid film shot surreptitiously on location in Johannesburg. During the filming of Good Times, Wonderful Times, Rogosin became a leading voice in European protests against the Vietnam War. Rogosin’s later films—a trio of black liberation films shot for European television and a film on the Arab-Israel conflict from 1974—found limited audiences in the United States, and he spend the remainder of the decade fighting for greater diversity in American commercial broadcasting. He was also a founding member of the New American Cinema Group and ran the influential independent Bleecker Street Cinema from 1960-1974.
Tanya Goldman is a doctoral student in Cinema Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on mid-twentieth century nonfiction film and its history as a political discourse and practice. Her work and reviews have appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, Jump Cut, and Senses of Cinema, and she has served as a member of the Peabody Awards nominating committee for documentary television programming.
