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NOTE: Read Cinema Gotham’s interview with The Keep The River on Your Right directors David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro

THE STRAIGHT DOPE:
The best most documentaries can hope for is to fully
explore their subject matter, to make it real and to bring it to life for an
audience that may not have had any knowledge of it before the lights went down.
David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s Keep the River on Your Right does that
but it does something more involving as well. It has the ability to surprise.
Throughout the film there are moments when even the most jaded audience member
has to sit up in his seat and take notice.

The Shapiro siblings worked on Keep the River on Your Right for seven
years but the story was actually nearly half a century in the making. In 1955
artist Tobias Schneebaum traveled to Peru on a Fullbright fellowship. After
he’d seen everything he went there to see he traveled on foot into the Amazon
jungle looking for a remote Catholic mission. Once there he stumbled on a man
with feathers adorning his face. The man’s tribe had just been slaughtered by
another tribe. Schneebaum realized that he needed to learn more. He traveled
further into the jungle and ended up living with a local head-hunting tribe.
They took him on as one of their own and involved him in their rituals and ceremonies.
After a few months they took him on a raid of a neighboring tribe. What happened
next was something that caused Schneebaum to have to leave the Amazon and not
return for 45 years.

The occasion of his return was the making of Keep the River on Your Right.
The Shapiros, having read his book on the experience, persuaded him (over much
protestation, some of which appears in the film) to return to his heart of darkness.
Schneebaum is one of the most eloquent film subjects imaginable. Between his
keen observations and the numerous passages from his books (often read aloud
in the locations that inspired them) he paints the portrait of a man with a
complex and rarely flattering self-image. He calls himself unattractive repeatedly
and regards his own netherworld existence (not quite fully comfortable in his
New York home but unable to fully commit to a life in the jungle either) with
a wry smile. Still, the Shapiros delve deeper into his psyche while traveling
further down the river.

The first sequence of the film sets up Tobias’ complex relationship with other
cultures by taking him to Asmat, an area in New Guinea where he had a much different
and more positive experience. There he discovered people who shared his love
of art (their carvings are what brought him there) and his need for human contact.
The pervasiveness of homosexual relationships in Asmat and Schneebaum’s connection
to them is only one of the film’s key surprises. The Shapiros rarely reveal
anything too early, often allowing Schneebaum to tell his story at his own speed.
When he’s reunited with, Aipit, an Asmat man with whom he had a meaningful and
sexual relationship, the emotion in Schneebaum’s voice says it all. Later on
when a New York acquaintance addresses the seemingly extreme form of native fetishizing
that Schneebaum feels it becomes clear that these are subjects that have thought
about who they are. These aren’t just people with a curiosity about the world
and a naive sense of Western entitlement. Schneebaum has clearly spent his life
examining his place in the world. The decades of nightmares that his Peru experience
left him with is testament to that.

Whether he’s in New York, New Guinea or the Amazon, Schneebaum always seems
a little restless, like there’s always someplace else he’d rather be. Even though
he’s the least likely global adventurer (moviegoers who read a capsule review
of the film might have expected an Indiana Jones-type and not the short, balding
gay man they got) Schneebaum is the perfect tour guide through the far corners
of the world. His emotional investment in the Asmat culture as well as his expertise in the region makes the early sequences fascinating. His unease with his return to Peru adds a real dynamic that would be utterly lacking if the same region were covered in a travelogue or if Schneebaum narrated his story from a studio.

That’s the beauty of Keep the River on Your Right. There is real emotional honesty on display here among the film’s subjects and that honesty is reflected in the filmmaking. Having made the difficult trek to the actual locations, the Shapiros use all the elements available to them (their subject’s natural sense of wonder, the nature around them, the force of history and Western social curiosity) to craft an extraordinarily unique and fascinating film, one that will likely leave a totally different (but equally lasting) impression on each viewer.

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