Maven's Nest
Reel Life: Flick Pix
- Riverbank 1978, and Barry Wasserman with iPhone, both by Robb Moss
Most of us Baby Boomers didn’t have motion picture cameras in hand to document our freewheeling youth, then growing into middle age, until now when we are in our silver years – but Robb Moss did.
By Nora Lee Mandel
The Bend In The River
Directed by Robb Moss
Edited by Jeff Malmberg
Produced by Lisa Remington and Kristin Feeley
82 mins.
Opens August 14 in retrospective with Riverdogs (1982) and The Same River Twice (2003) at Film Forum and Metrograph. For future screenings
We Baby Boomers seemed to dominate any media for the past 80 years. But unlike Generation Z, most of us didn’t usually have motion picture cameras in hand to document our freewheeling youth, then growing into middle age, until now when we are in our silver years.
But Robb Moss did. He was just beginning to get the idea of being a director, eventually to graduate school, and an academic sinecure teaching younger future directors. (An avocational exception is my husband who was his high school yearbook Photography Editor and has continued capturing the images of his oldest friends, albeit in stills.)
Moss first laden himself with 16mm camera equipment and with the forebearance of his oldest and newest friends at age 25 in 1978. An experienced Western river guide, he documented their 35-day trip through the Grand Canyon down the Colorado River. He caught his “Woodstock Generation” in all their verité “back to the garden” colorful exuberance in the isolated landscape of timeless cliff formations and challenging nature, made famous by the more straight-laced John Ford. There are also the frictions of communal living. Moss later edited the footage into the 32-minute Riverdogs (1982), inaugurating what came to be called “personal documentaries”.
After Moss traveled the world and settled on the East Coast, he would bring along a standard definition video camera whenever he visited the five friends over more than four years. These were the crucial, busy middle years in lives of choosing marriage or divorce, children or not, steady jobs or volunteer service. Moss edited this footage into the follow-up The Same River Twice (78 minutes, 2003). Interlacing the earlier footage into this film like ghostly flashbacks, sometimes he would show his friends the old footage and shoot their reactions. The women saw the most ironies about their changing relationships with the men. One recalls a man: “I was so in love with him then” – revealing why she no longer is. She curses another, bossy young man on the screen: “I didn’t have the nerve to say it then, but I can now.” As to the one still free spirit – a woman drily notes: “He was the greatest summer boyfriend one could have. It didn’t work out in the winter.” Another guy faces his mortality and realizes his mother’s too. This “Part 2” was successfully shown at film festivals and released into theaters. One participating woman who lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico tells Moss, not altogether happily, that it played there for four months.
With the significance of longitudinal documentaries growing, spurred by the British Up series, and frequent comic suggestions for a title, Moss embarked over nine years (six years filming in high definition, three years editing) to re-visit his now more camera-wary, but very active friends at significant times as they age into Social Security, fulfilling the warnings of how our demographic bulge would threaten its solvency.
For The Bend In The River, Moss helps organize a couple of river trips – and the title appears as that’s what we see. (While women sing traditional songs in each of the documentaries, including Moss’s now-partner Davia Nelson, I kept thinking of Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of “River of No Return” in Otto Preminger’s 1954 film.) Their 20something guide points out how the lowered river has aged, too. The involvement of one guy in the earlier films becomes an issue in his run for public office, and his daughter and ex-wife/ campaign manager advise on response strategy. It appears that only one of these senior citizens has a grandchild, with new potential responsibilities. Moss says he is trying to get at the internal aspects of aging, rather than how fiction epics focus on the external changes to show time passing. Even the still fiddle-playing, long-bearded, off-the-grid free spirit has to face his limited future. But one very healthy 71-year-old woman invites her friend the director back for her 91st birthday.
Moss has known several of these friends since he was 12 to 15. Yet we hear no remembrances of where they grew up together, or what their families, neighborhoods, or schools were like, or any comparisons to where they are now. Do they have ethnic or religious backgrounds, or did this generation completely reject their past? The only past we see is the returning and outtake footage from the previous films in what is now a trilogy, as if they only existed in that dimension.
What is remarkably stable over the trilogy is their distinctive personalities, with their strengths and flaws. Even as they work to help their communities, there is recognition of what they’ve learned about themselves over their years and how that becomes the basis for their versions of retirement.
8/11/2026
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
Complete Index to Nora Lee Mandel's Movie Reviews
My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists and for Jewish film festivals. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
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