On the Bowery

They are construction workers, coal miners, workers in the oil fields or on the port docks. They are strong but beaten, beautiful but dirty, broken and still hoping for the best - standing at the center of cinematic realism that flourished in the first half of the 20th-Century. In Lionel Rogosin's world they wander across Manhattan - between bars, the church, soup kitchens and shelters, at work. In this realm, Rogosin directs, as a magician moving between illusion and reality, the last cinematic chapter of the myth of white and "heroic" American man. On the Bowery foreshadows the cultural revolution of the 1960s and, moreover, the fading of these representations.