Keep the River On Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale

Tobias Schneebaum is an 80-year-old Jewish homosexual cannibal from New York City -- or so the Shapiros, this documentary's brother-and-sister filmmaking team would have us believe. Technically, the description of Schneebaum is correct, and there's no doubt that the cannibal label also helps sell tickets (the Shapiros even include the “c” word in the title subheading). But I don't know that eating a bite of human flesh while living with a headhunting tribe in Peru many decades ago makes one a bona fide cannibal. (For the record, however, I am not fully credentialed to say who is and who isn't.) Schneebaum is a fascinating man, and I'm not saying that his life story shouldn't have been made into a feature-length documentary. Keep the River on Your Right is a movie about the personality, contradictions, travels, and life journey of this artist turned explorer -- a man who abandoned his career as a rising abstract expressionist artist in Fifties New York and traveled to the jungles of Indonesia and Peru and lived among the local tribespeople and abided by their customs. It's a movie about an artist who gave up painting to study indigenous wood carvings, and who now makes his living delivering museum lectures to the “Barnard girls” in NYC and to tony vacationers aboard cruise ships. It's also a movie about a social renegade who finds refuge among the world's other “primitive” outsiders. There's no doubt that Schneebaum is an intriguing character whose example has much to tell us about the New York art world, the wilds of New Guinea (where Michael Rockefeller was so famously presumed lost and eaten), and the Peruvian Amarakaire people with whom he participated in a hunting raid during which neighboring villagers were killed and eaten. However, the filmmakers make the same mistake that Schneebaum often does: They predetermine what they find. They come to these endeavors with preconceived notions about what they will discover … and, unsurprisingly, find what they seek every time. The Shapiros initially have to do much coaxing in order to talk the near-octogenarian Schneebaum into returning to the jungle. They goad him to talk about the cannibalism despite his admittance of taking a single bite during a solitary experience. A young friend of Schneebaum's (who admits he's in a position to know) teases the older man about his sexual fantasies. “There's nothing Tobias likes more than a scarified black man with a hard-on,” he confesses to the camera. Indeed, Schneebaum rediscovers one of his old Indonesian lovers, and finds tribal homosexuality wherever he goes. Once again, I'm in no position to gauge this movie on its anthropological merits. But it's clear that Keep the River on Your Right should not be mistaken for an ethnographic study. The movie is biographical in nature and not quite up to the task of posing as “a modern cannibal tale.” The digital filmmaking practiced here no doubt permitted the essential portability of the project as it traveled into remote regions, but the lowered image definition is not a real asset to the travelogue nature of this movie. The obvious thing is to say that Keep the River on Your Right has unfortunately bitten off more than it can chew -- but not more than we can digest. And to answer the question that everyone seems to ask: It tastes a little like pork.