Keep the River on Your Right


Synopsis
This documentary details the adventures of Fulbright scholar, artist, and explorer Tobias Schneebaum, including forty-five years ago when he made his home with a cannibalistic tribe in the Amazon basin. (R, 2002)


Observations
If you are looking for a film that will educate you on the people with whom Schneebaum stayed, the Harakambut, this is not the documentary for you. This is a film about Schneebaum, for Schneebaum. Don’t get me wrong, this old guy had an amazing life and this documentary attempts to depict that. The filmmakers take Schneebaum back to the area where he had stayed with the tribe back in the forties. I guess this is supposed to be revelatory for Schneebaum or for the natives he had encountered. It really ends up being neither. The natives no longer dress in loin cloths -- now they wear Pepsi t-shirts. So much has changed.

Homosexual relations were not taboo in the culture that Schneebaum visited, and neither was cannibalism. Schneebaum participated in both. He speaks with some sadness about the cannibal episode, but in talk show clips from the 1950’s and 1960’s Schneebaum seems more interested in titillating the masses than educating. Schneebaum’s much younger lover points out that Schneebaum has erotic fantasies about the big, strong, black men with which he spent time. Not exactly the impartial observer.

In Schneebaum’s defense, he was not an anthropologist or social scientist. He was just a dude on scholarship that decided to explore. That he infused himself among the Harakambut and was so eager to fit in with them could be a statement about the way that homosexuals at that time were being treated in the United States. It must have been amazing to meet a culture where homosexuality was not only not taboo, but expected as a natural part of adult sexuality. And those feelings of personal freedom perhaps drove Schneebaum to participate in the cannibalism of the tribe because he wanted to be part of them – a strapping black native – not a fragile white gay New Yorker. What would happen if we all found the Shangri-la where all our personal taboos are accepted without question?

Rating:
Amazon's entry for Keep the River on Your Right