Lionel Rogosin’s 1960 drama “Come Back, Africa” is two remarkable documents in one.Shot under false pretenses, it is a rare stolen record of apartheid and township culture in South Africa. It’s also an artifact of the period’s revolution in truly independent filmmaking, alongside John Cassavetes’s “Shadows” and the New York avant-garde.

This weekend, Anthology Film Archives screens a newly restored print of the film, no doubt partly because the theater’s heritage traces back to Mr. Rogosin’s pioneering contemporaries, such as Jonas Mekas and Stanley Brakhage. Despite awkward acting and plotting, the film still boasts forceful images of poverty and depredation as well as glimpses into the rich culture of the Sophiatown township.

Born in New York, Rogosin could have settled into a workaday existence at his father’s prosperous textile firm, but social conscience, ready cash, and restlessness beat out rayon.

Within a few years, he shot the superb “On the Bowery,” a sympathetic portrait of street derelicts. The watershed independent film was nominated for an Oscar in the documentary category but was actually hugely influential for its complicated mix of improvisation and scripting (and for getting made at all).

“Come Back, Africa” is in some ways inferior to “On the Bowery” (which will also soon show in restored form, at the Tribeca Film Festival). After all, it’s a little harder to shoot off the cuff in Johannesburg than the Bowery, just a stroll from Rogosin’s home in Greenwich Village. Nor does Rogosin’s well-intentioned strategy of letting his amateur actors direct themselves help much.

Nothing, however, can take away from Rogosin’s Neorealistic panorama of a South African township. Ravaged buildings and dust-swirled roads are home to Zachariah, the lead character, a young family man driven to Sophiatown from the Zulu homelands. Buffeted from one job to the next, he lives in a terrifying state of siege, at perpetual risk of arrest because of work-permit laws.

He starts work as a miner. Training involves synchronized shoveling and, for some reason, desk exercises arranging domino-like blocks into piles. When he and the other miners troop into the tunnels, the snaking subterranean crowd is an unstylized version of “Metropolis.”

Zachariah’s meager home is lit only by a gas lamp and seems to be wallpa pered with newspaper. In his job as servant for a white family, playing the radio proves an irresistible temptation. “He’s only a native,” the husband sighs to his exasperated wife, in one of the painfully stilted staged scenes.

But Sophiatown was also a thriving, diverse cultural and intellectual mecca, and Rogosin in fact co-wrote “Come Back, Africa” with literary luminaries Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane. Zachariah’s country-mouse visits to a shebeen (a clandestine bar hangout) are a representative highlight. The playfully barbed debates at the shebeen make mention of liberal ladies who invite blacks to tea and repeatedly tell them not to be afraid.

Interspersed throughout Zachariah’s travels and travails are performances by street musicians. During filming, Rogosin warded off authorities by claiming to make a movie about music, and, ironically, this loose, lively footage is some of the film’s best: gumboot dancers, penny-whistle mavens, and a singing circle rendering Elvis’s hit “Teddy Bear.” Back at the shebeen, a young Miriam Makeba also shows up to belt out a song, after two seconds of begging.

Even in its own time, “Come Back, Africa” faced mixed reviews, and Rogosin ended up giving its U.S. premiere at a theater he founded himself (the Bleecker Street Cinema, one of New York’s famous lost art houses). But the film climaxes with undeniably raw scenes of despair and rage that are virtually unheralded by the staginess that goes before – a good final reminder of the freer new cinema Rogosin was helping to unleash.

Until March 25 (32 Second Avenue at 2nd Street, 212-505-5181).