Robb Moss & Amanda Micheli: Truth seekers

 

The pairing of Robb Moss and Amanda Micheli presents two filmmakers, of different generations and genders, united by a common vision of truthseeking cinema. Whether directing and photographing their own works, or as hired collaborators on others’ projects, Moss and Micheli bring a committed curiosity to their subjects that harkens back to the very roots of documentary film, roots that run directly through Boston’s filmmaking legacy.

Moss developed his filmmaking style while at M.I.T. under the tutelage of Ricky Leacock and Ed Pincus. This revolutionary program adopted a personal, intimate style of filmmaking embodied by Pincus’s masterpiece Diaries. To this day, a shockingly raw film, Diaries opened the door for unflinching first-person cinema, unfettered by commercial interest, instead driven by personal expression and exploration.

Moss’s Riverdogs (1978) embodied all of these principles, while detailing an entirely original vision, one marked by lyricism, poetic imagery, and sensual editorial rhythms. This brilliant film and its cyclical continuation in Same River Twice (2003) revealed Moss’ interest in exploring philosophical and existential issues, including the passage of time, history, and memory, via cinematic means. Employing cinema’s purest forms, observed images and sounds, and avoiding voiceover and title cards, Moss’ films become meditative, even transcendental.

Moss has combined his commitment to personal filmmaking with teaching at Harvard University. He has become known as a professor invested in his students and their artistic development, and clearly from the roster of his former students who’ve gone on to become successful documentarians, including Nina Davenport, Jehane Nouhaim, Lauren Greenfield, among others, his impact has been extraordinary. Of all his students, perhaps none reveal as many commonalities with his own artistic path as Amanda Micheli.

Like Moss, Micheli balances personal projects with hired work, while maintaining a resolute interest in films that “tell the truth.” Like her former teacher, a gifted cinematographer herself, it should be well noted that when Moss needed someone to photograph a key scene for Same River, he trusted Micheli with his vision.

As Moss did with Riverdogs, Micheli directed, photographed, and edited her first film Just for the Ride, a prize-winning documentary about cowgirls on the Professional Rodeo circuit. The film’s imagery and textures revealed a strong cinematic sensibility, while its story about women entering a “man’s world” highlighted what would become a career long fascination with women willing to transgress social expectations in the face of long odds and discrimination.

Working as cinematographer and producer, Micheli has collaborated with fellow Harvard alum and Moss student Lauren Greenfield on Thin, the acclaimed documentary about women battling extreme anorexia. Their collaboration resulted in a film marked both by its subtle, intimate observations as well as its underlying compassion and genuine concern for its subjects.

Micheli’s La Corona, co-directed by Isabel Vega, premiered at Sundance in 2008 to enormous acclaim, received an IDA award, and an Academy Award nomination. The film represents in many ways a summation of Micheli’s evolution. The subject is exotic and yet consistent with her filmography: In Bogota, Colombia, a women’s prison holds an annual beauty pageant as fierce as the inmates themselves.

Through Micheli’s lens, this initially bizarre tabloid becomes a multi-layered tragedy, as the women intimately reveal their often dark histories. The film’s ability to humanize its subjects, even as our instincts initially seek to exoticize them, harkens back to Moss’s own film on globetrotting journalism, The Tourist (1991).

Whether working on their own personal projects, or in collaboration with others, Moss and Micheli have stayed true to their commitment to using cinema to grapple with the world, revealing not only meaning and understanding, but poetry and mystery. They share innate gifts for cinema’s purest forms: sight and sound. Their rich filmographies prove that the legacy of Boston’s documentary filmmaking continues, as these two artists continue to pioneer their truth telling.

 

Peter Dowd
Consulting Curator

 

 

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