In ‘The Bend In The River,’ Friends Head Down The Colorado Again On Cinematic Journey Stretching Back Over 45 Years – Doc Stories

Director Robb Moss has come to the end – possibly – of a momentous cinematic journey that has seen him document a group of his river-rafting friends over three films going back more than 40 years.

He screened the third film in his trilogy, The Bend in the River, this weekend at SFFILM’s Doc Stories festival in San Francisco after premiering the feature at Telluride earlier in the year. At a Q&A moderated by SFFILM’s director of programming Jessie Fairbanks, Moss seemed not quite ready to make a grand summation of his “longitudinal” filmmaking project.

“I am not there yet. I’m not far enough along to be able to know the answer to that question,” he told the capacity audience at the Vogue Theatre. “There’s something clarified about my own life in finishing the film. Not that I know what it means, but I can feel something afoot. Maybe that’s the start of an answer.”

The trilogy began in the late 1970s with Moss’s film Riverdogs, documenting a rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon with buddies Danny Silver, Jim Tickenor, Cathy Shaw, Jeff Golden, and Barry Wasserman. They were in their 20s then, often unclothed, exuding the vitality of youth and relatively free of worry – navigating the choppy waters of the Colorado if not choppy waters in life. The Same River Twice, released in 2003, found the friends in middle age, most of them raising children, contending with family, romantic partnerships and careers.

The Bend in the River, also filmed on a rafting trip down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, encounters the group in their 70s now – not necessarily prepared to embrace the term “seniors” and yet – as Danny says in the film – not quite convinced it’s still appropriate to call themselves middle-aged (there not being too many 142 year olds around).

“I didn’t love having a camera in my face for 40 years, but I did love visiting… my friends and we got to do a river trip a year ago on the Colorado,” Silver said, articulating a degree of ambivalence about the long-running project that’s probably shared to greater or lesser degrees by all of the filmmaking “subjects.” “My sadness about it is just that I won’t see Robb as much, hanging around filming all of us. But it’s been great, and we are connected outside the film obviously, but it was also a thread that ran through everything and it’s a little bittersweet to just say goodbye to that, and a huge relief.”

The Bend in the River weaves unpredictably between the three films, the narrative – like a river flowing – assembled with the very considerable assistance of editor Jeff Malmberg.

“He’s an extraordinary editor,” Moss said of Malmberg, who attended the Doc Stories event with his wife and daughter. “But that doesn’t quite say it because… he’s just this extraordinary person, filmmaker. He has a feeling for footage. He just threw himself into this film, kept the fires burning in the edit room when I couldn’t be there. His fingerprints are on everything in this movie that you’ve seen.”

The witty Barry Wasserman provides regular moments of tart humor in the film, even when addressing ostensibly serious topics, like his experience with testicular cancer. At one point he says he can’t identify with men who lost a left testicle to that form of cancer, because he lost his right one.

“When I saw the movie, there was just too much fuddy-ness from my point of view. I’m so glad I got cancer. There had to be something not funny,” he joked at the Q&A. He went on to describe his reflexive humor as a defense mechanism. “I am not really just a joker all the time, but [what] I have told Robb is almost every one of the scenes where I’m being funny is I’m uncomfortable. I’m being filmed, I’m being asked if I’m in a support group [for cancer survivors] or we’re in the car when I talk about, ‘I know your gimmicks.’ The camera’s aimed at me, I have nothing to say, I’m slightly uncomfortable, but instead of saying, ‘Turn off the camera,’ I figure a way to kind of parry.”

Cathy Shaw spoke amusingly to a phenomenon of aging, when immediate experience sometimes doesn’t “stick” in the mind.

“It is one of really the benefits of growing old that many people don’t realize is that you can see a film in one week and then again in the next and turn to your husband and say, ‘Have we seen this?’ ‘No, I don’t think we have,’” she mused at the Q&A. “So yeah, this was all new to me.”

Shaw described what she remembered as a “shit show” on the making of Riverdogs in the 1970s when camera equipment and batteries were vastly more cumbersome than they are today and took up huge amounts of space on the boats heading down the Colorado.

“We were there in October [on Riverdogs],” she recalled. “There was not enough sun to recharge the batteries. It was MIT film equipment that [Robb] just said, ‘Oh, I’m going to borrow this.’ And maybe didn’t tell them where he was taking it, but it was just nerve wracking all the time.”

Shaw reflected on the bends in the river that have led now to three films. “When I realized he was telling a story about a generation that is not unlike any other generation,” Shaw observed, “how you begin young and vibrant and full of life with lots of time and then as you reach the end of life, you’re looking back as well as looking forward. You have fears or whatever ambition still. And I think he told a beautiful story in that way, and I was happy to be a vehicle for him.”

For the audience, the film almost feels like joining these friends on the river journey – but somehow shifting between many decades.

“It’s not really built out of biography, ‘This happened and that happened,’” Moss said of his approach to the storytelling. “People had extraordinary lives, biographically, that aren’t in the film. And it seemed like when there were scenes like that that had too much biography, it’s like the film flattened. But the whole thing had to move more… the dynamic of something going downstream. It just had to keep bouncing forward even as it went backwards and forwards. The beginning of the piece had to be very clear what we were up to, that there were going to be multiple timeframes. [But] there’s no saying there’s multiple films, there’s no saying there’s multiple timeframes, there’s no dates, timestamps, there’s no voiceover, there’s no music to cover up cuts.”

Moss continued, “It seemed… that every cut in the film is that possible answer to the question, what is the relationship of the past to the present or the present to the future? Each cut gives another example of what that relationship might be… We tried to find something that had to do with time as much as it had to do with character, as much as it had to do with storytelling. But time and the river — that was the throughput.”

Will there be a fourth film in the series? Moss hasn’t said anything definitive on the subject. But for now, it’s oars down, cameras down.