The Tourist. 1991. 60m. Robb Moss. Independent. US. English. Rated .
Contrasting his travels abroad on film-shooting assignments with his husbandly efforts on the home front, trying unsuccessfully with his wife to have a baby, Robb Moss casts a slyly reflexive glance at the passive role of the non-fiction filmmaker. The Tourist examines his increasing uneasiness with filming people in cultures other than his own and his fear that both his art and his life have become acts of tourism. His solution is to insert the filmmaker as a character into the work and, with humor and poignancy, to begin to particularize and personalize the distant lives he encounters. – Harvard Film Archive
Preceded by:
Riverdogs. 1982. 32m. Robb Moss. Independent. US. English. Rated .
Shot over a month-long trip down the Colorado River in 1978, Robb Moss’s film debut is a lyrical montage of youthful exuberance, featuring a cohort of rarely clothed river guides as they navigate rapids, cook and camp, and deliberate whether or not to extend their edenic journey. Moss would revisit some of the same subjects for subsequent features The Same River Twice and The Bend in the River (both screening on Nov. 8 with in-person appearances from Robb Moss), incorporating scenes and outtakes from Riverdogs in each.
