VES Lecturer’s Film Screens at Sundance

Out of the 4,000 submissions to the Sundance Film Festival by aspiring independent filmmakers who worship Tarantino, respect Renoir and can recite the manifesto of Dogma 95, only a handful made the final cut—including a documentary by Harvard Visual and Environmental Studies lecturer Robb Moss.

But Moss hardly fits the mold of the pomo hipsters who currently dominate the independent film-making scene; with a modest collared shirt and a neatly trimmed beard creeping with gray, he comes off more Spielberg than Solondz.

His worldly, experienced perspective comes across in the theme of his Sundance entry, The Same River Twice, which follows five former river guides as they each deal with the complexity of middle-age life.

The movie begins with scenes taken from the footage for one of Moss’ earliest films, Riverdogs, which documented one of the last river trips that he made with his friends. The images—immediately distinguishable from the modern footage by their grainy, nostalgic texture—portray the experiences of a group of seventeen twenty-somethings reluctant to abandon the adolescence that they have long outgrown.

They travel down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon for 35 days, brave tempestuous rapids and make communal decisions. They also usually wear no clothes. They share the ideals of the ’60s, though Moss filmed it in the late ’70s.

After releasing Riverdogs in 1982, Moss left behind the lure of the river and went on to produce a number of non-fiction films, including Africa Revisited and The Tourist, which was awarded Best Documentary at the Sinking Creek Film Festival.

But in 1992, following his mother’s tragic death, Moss took another trip down the river.

“There was something about that event and sitting by the river at the end of that trip a couple weeks later, and thinking, ‘I left the river to do something,’” he says. “I could see a shape to the previous fifteen years, this sort of shape of my adult choices: trying to make a family, trying to make a career, trying to have life in the world. I was unaware that that’s why I had left the river, but that was clearly the reason.”

This epiphany served as inspiration for what became The Same River Twice.

Moss spent four years following five of the former Riverdogs, documenting the various tragedies and triumphs that they encounter in their middle age. Moss spends the most time with Barry, who splits his life between his mother, his family and his mayoral re-election campaign.

Moss’ most compelling interviewee, Jim, is still a river guide and has no family or real home. He dreams of spending his life caring for plants. His lifestyle, which doesn’t appear to have changed much at all after almost two decades, evokes both pity and admiration.

“People will bring their own beliefs to how they think Jim’s life is. I don’t pity him at all,” Moss says. “I think he’s living the life he means to have, and it’s maybe not the life I would have chosen. But in the film, he functions as a kind of control group. He’s like what would have happened if we’d all stayed on the trip.”

In addition to the footage of day-to-day life, there are also informal “interviews” interspersed throughout the film, where the five people are shown the old Riverdogs footage and asked to respond.

These scenes often elicit the deepest insight into the experience of adapting the ideals of their young adulthood to the demands of a family and full-time occupation.

Here, the themes of the film emerge, as these individuals express what Moss calls “a kind of continuousness of values between then and now.” The film tries to reject the conventional portrayal of the hippie-gone-capitalist, instead suggesting that the river that embodied their youthful freedom still directs their lives in different ways.

Moss says he is very satisfied with the resulting film and the attention that it’s been receiving. He was shocked to hear that the film was accepted by Sundance —where it will be screened on Jan. 18—and says he refuses to believe that he has a chance of winning the Documentary Competition, remarking that the entries are “all great films.”

“You have to assume you’re not gonna win,” he says.

He says the success has caused him to think about filmmaking from a whole new angle.

“Now I’m in this mode of having to think about it in a way I hadn’t, and I’m learning all about publicists and producers reps and posters and positioning and press,” he says. “I’m trying to take it seriously without taking it too seriously.”

Friend and Mallinckrodt Professor of History and Science Peter Galison says Moss’ film is highly successful.

“Moss uses every frame to underscore time passing, an awareness of mortality that illuminates a kind of passionate caring in the character,” he says.