28th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
Good Times, Wonderful Times
director: Lionel Rogosin
original title: Good Times, Wonderful Times
country: United States
year: 1965
running time: 70 min.
synopsis
Almost twenty years after the end of the war, an ordinary cocktail party in London brings together a subset of wealthy, and mostly young, individuals. Behind the rhythm of rock music, war-related topics such as nuclear disaster, life in the army, and killing the enemy, occasionally flicker in and out of the conversation. While the small talk continues unimpeded, the director sees these moments as signals for visualizing specific, jarring images depicting the subject matter of speech perceived at face value. Rogosin splices stock footage into the film that he himself found primarily in film archives in England, Japan, Hungary, and Poland.“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.”
---
Source: https://uniondocs.org/event/2016-01-28-good-times-wonderful-times/
biography
Lionel Rogosin (1924–2000) was an American independent documentary filmmaker for whom filmmaking became part of a broader concept of political activism. In New York, he ran the Bleecker Street Cinema and was a founding and active member of the New American Cinema movement alongside the likes of Jonas Mekas.more about film
| director: | Lionel Rogosin |
