E-Mail This Article to a Friend Hearts of darkness The Crocodile River and Empathy at the MFA BY GERALD PEARY

Good-egg Harvard alums seem almost embarrassed by their educational fortune, muttering that they "went to college in Boston." So I wasn’t surprised that never once in "One Man’s Journey," the engrossing autobiographical Robert Perkins series that’s on PBS’s Frontline and at the Museum of Fine Arts this month, does the modest Cantabrigian mention his time at Harvard Yard. As for his post–Ivy League career move to an insurance-office cubbyhole on Wall Street: like Melville’s Bartleby, he preferred not to.

At age 17 and again at 36, Perkins was hospitalized because of psychotic breakdowns. He met a deep-thinking woman, Dr. Irene Goodale, who two months after their wedding died of breast cancer. Before that tragedy, an anguished Perkins had spent much of his life away from civilization, canoeing deep into the Canadian Northwest Territories, where even the Inuit stay clear. He’d slowly heal himself above the Arctic Circle, camping on the soggy tundra, journeying through perilous rapids, and communing with the birds and the caribou and the rocks.

Crazy as a loon? Perhaps: the loon, with its plaintive, lonely trill, is Perkins’s favorite bird, and the name of his canoe is Loon. He took one companion into the wilderness, a 16mm sound camera on the early voyages, later a video camera. He’d place the camera on a tripod and converse with it daily, making it a confidant to his worries and to his pantheist philosophizing.

A lunatic gesture? Remember that talking aloud kept Robinson Crusoe mentally afloat in Daniel Defoe’s classic castaway saga. More important, Perkins’s informal camera diaries became the raw stuff of his fine documentaries. Frontline viewers and MFA filmgoers have already been treated to parts one and two of Perkins’s canoeing trilogy, Into the Great Solitude (1987) and Talking to Angels (1993). And there’s a cumulative power to experiencing them in order. But you don’t have to have seen the first two films to savor his brand new work, The Crocodile River, which airs on WGBH at 10 p.m. next Thursday, January 27, and, better yet, on screen at the MFA the same day at 6 p.m. and then January 30 at 12:10 p.m., when Perkins will be present.

It’s a different journey: the filmmaker’s attempt, after desolate years of being affected by his wife’s death, to return to civilization, though by the most circuitous route. Perkins speaks in canoe trips, so this one starts at the Victoria Falls in South Africa and concludes, months later, at the Indian Ocean in Mozambique. What’s really new for the man of solitude is that Crusoe gets his Friday: Bonus Lunga, a dignified Zimbabwean guide who becomes the second canoeist in Perkins’s vessel, Just So.

The new film is heavily populated. "In Africa, you are not on your own," Perkins says. "If you think you’re alone, someone comes out of the bushes to check you out and look at you." As Perkins and Lunga navigate the Limpopo River, they can’t help stumbling into the complicated, often unhappy politics of the area: a rich Afrikaner émigré from Zimbabwe who has re-established his colonialist empire; impoverished blacks from Zimbabwe jailed in South Africa, where they’ve fled seeking employment; American hunters shooting dead zebras as trophies; huge tracks of land being cleared of people so that an eco-park can be established to lure foreign tourists.

But there’s a glimmer at the end of the river. It’s the fabulous Indian Ocean, a sight made more astonishing because Lunga has never seen the sea before — he’s an expert river guide who’s never tasted salt water. And Robert Perkins? Maybe he’s ready to face America again.

Also at the MFA, getting eight screenings between January 26 and February 17, is Empathy, a first feature written and directed by New York poet Amie Siegel that’s a wonderfully playful and insightful investigation of psychoanalysis. Siegel’s theory-informed film dances in and out of fiction and documentary, moving from a scripted, intentionally melodramatic tale of a late 30ish woman (Gigi Buffington) lost in her unhappy vocation as a voiceover performer to revelatory interviews with a trio of real-life veteran (male) therapists, these conducted by the shrewd (female) filmmaker. There’s a digressive trip to Freud’s home in pre-war Vienna and a merry interlude about the invention of the Eames Chair, beloved of psychiatrists. But best are the talks with the shrinks, who actually answer those sexy, personal questions that patients thirst to ask them but, of course, the rules of therapy disallow.