Robb Moss Is Still Going with the Flow
In 1978, a Californian named Robb Moss, then twenty-eight, went on a five-week float trip through the Grand Canyon with a bunch of fellow river rats. As an aspiring filmmaker, Moss brought along two cameras (a synch-sound handheld and a Bolex on a tripod he lashed to the stern of a dory) and later cut the footage, much of it of his friends naked on the sand and stone, into a short documentary called “Riverdogs.” The idea was to memorialize a vanishing Eden and the end of his five years of vagabonding, working on rivers, paying no rent. This trip was a last hurrah. “I considered the film to be like a cave painting,” he said recently. “I was commemorating our life, our deeds, as though it was a hunt.”
Moss was walking along another water course, the Loch, the stream in the Ravine, at the north end of Central Park. He’d just spent a day scouting at Mount Sinai Hospital, for a documentary that he was planning about its neurosurgery department, and he was getting a gulp of greenery before dinner. He is now, at seventy-six, a film professor and former department chair at Harvard, and is a half century (and more than a dozen films) removed from that restless seeker wearing no pants in the Big Ditch. Still, he has a serene aspect that one might guess is the ripening of that rudderless youth—or of what he learned from his subsequent films about its expiration.
Twenty years after “Riverdogs,” he made “The Same River Twice,” a feature-length update, combining a lot of the 1978 footage with fresh film following five of those riverdogs as they navigate the banalities and indignities of middle age. This film attracted a keen fan base. The past-present juxtapositions—of bodies, circumstances, attitudes, and even film stock—made for a sly and poignant ode to (or lament over) time’s passage. The lives had layers, like the geological strata of the canyon’s walls.
Eight years ago, Moss returned to those waters a third time. His new movie, “The Bend in the River,” again repurposes the old footage and incorporates new material featuring the same friends, now on the crest of old age. The years are not solely unkind.
“The Bend in the River” is being screened at Film Forum this month. Moss would love the trilogy to be shown together. “Each film is about the view from there, which was then the view from here,” he said. (He wouldn’t run them chronologically; he’d show “The Same River Twice,” then “Riverdogs,” then “The Bend in the River.”)
The Ravine, on this evening, was as verdant as the Grand Canyon hundreds of millions of years ago, when it consisted of coastal lowland and swamp. Moss mentioned another film he’d made called “Containment.” “It was about the difficulty of containing nuclear materials for time frames longer than anyone can imagine,” he said. While he was filming, the Fukushima accident occurred, and, two years later, he went to Japan. “Everything was covered in this nuclear dust, a coat of cesium and strontium. It didn’t change the color of the vegetation, but it made the exquisite beauty of it more poignant. That’s what this color green reminds me of.”
When Moss was seventeen, at Palisades High School in Los Angeles, his brother was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Moss graduated early and began travelling, getting as far as Afghanistan before abandoning a vague plan to go to Vietnam to find his brother. Instead, he went to college, at U.C. Berkeley. It was 1968.
“After I graduated, I felt that my job was to work against whatever ambitions I had accrued in my first twenty-two years,” Moss said. “Ambition was the handmaiden of the status quo.” So began the untethered era, whose end he celebrated in “Riverdogs.” With an old summer-camp friend, Barry Wasserman, he hitchhiked across the Sahara, south to north, then visited Paris, where he made his first film, a day-in-the-life piece. “It was that diaristic impulse, the urge to film the things around you. How do you know where you are?”
A lot of his friends were working as river guides then. While hitchhiking in Arizona, he saw a photo of a boat hitting a giant wave, which spurred him to find his way onto a rafting trip with Martin Litton, the great riverman of the Colorado. “I want to do that,” Moss thought. So for five years he did, in Mexico, California, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, and the Grand Canyon. “Then it stopped being satisfying enough,” he said. “I wasn’t learning anything new.” Grad school. Marriage. Career. Rent.
Near where the Loch empties into the Harlem Meer, a long-haired child, unaccompanied by an adult, bounded along the bank with a fly rod. “I just caught a nice largemouth!” the kid said. Moss paused to watch, as an oak catkin blew down and nestled in his hair. ♦