{"id":1203,"date":"2026-08-03T13:39:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T13:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1203"},"modified":"2026-08-03T13:39:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T13:39:59","slug":"robb-moss-is-still-going-with-the-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1203","title":{"rendered":"Robb Moss Is Still Going with the Flow"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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 \u201cRiverdogs.\u201d 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. \u201cI considered the film to be like a cave painting,\u201d he said recently. \u201cI was commemorating our life, our deeds, as though it was a hunt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Extra! Extra! Read All About It\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Again<\/a><\/p>\n

Moss was walking along another water course, the Loch, the stream in the Ravine, at the north end of Central Park. He\u2019d 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\u2014or of what he learned from his subsequent films about its expiration.<\/p>\n

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Twenty years after \u201cRiverdogs,\u201d he made \u201cThe Same River Twice,\u201d 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\u2014of bodies, circumstances, attitudes, and even film stock\u2014made for a sly and poignant ode to (or lament over) time\u2019s passage. The lives had layers, like the geological strata of the canyon\u2019s walls.<\/p>\n

Eight years ago, Moss returned to those waters a third time. His new movie, \u201cThe Bend in the River,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bend in the River\u201d is being screened at Film Forum this month. Moss would love the trilogy to be shown together. \u201cEach film is about the view from there, which was then the view from here,\u201d he said. (He wouldn\u2019t run them chronologically; he\u2019d show \u201cThe Same River Twice,\u201d then \u201cRiverdogs,\u201d then \u201cThe Bend in the River.\u201d)<\/p>\n

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\u2019d made called \u201cContainment.\u201d \u201cIt was about the difficulty of containing nuclear materials for time frames longer than anyone can imagine,\u201d he said. While he was filming, the Fukushima accident occurred, and, two years later, he went to Japan. \u201cEverything was covered in this nuclear dust, a coat of cesium and strontium. It didn\u2019t change the color of the vegetation, but it made the exquisite beauty of it more poignant. That\u2019s what this color green reminds me of.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more What Does It Even Mean to Be a Moderate?<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter I graduated, I felt that my job was to work against whatever ambitions I had accrued in my first twenty-two years,\u201d Moss said. \u201cAmbition was the handmaiden of the status quo.\u201d So began the untethered era, whose end he celebrated in \u201cRiverdogs.\u201d 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. \u201cIt was that diaristic impulse, the urge to film the things around you. How do you know where you are?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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. \u201cI want to do that,\u201d Moss thought. So for five years he did, in Mexico, California, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, and the Grand Canyon. \u201cThen it stopped being satisfying enough,\u201d he said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t learning anything new.\u201d Grad school. Marriage. Career. Rent.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI just caught a nice largemouth!\u201d the kid said. Moss paused to watch, as an oak catkin blew down and nestled in his hair.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Battle of the Dans<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The documentarian returns to the Grand Canyon for \u201cThe Bend in the River,\u201d the third film in his unofficial series on friendship, nature, and the passage of time. Nick Paumgarten reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-pictures"],"yoast_head":"\nRobb Moss Is Still Going with the Flow - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1203\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Robb Moss Is Still Going with the Flow - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The documentarian returns to the Grand Canyon for \u201cThe Bend in the River,\u201d the third film in his unofficial series on friendship, nature, and the passage of time. 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