The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
This film is part of Free
Hill to Dale
In the year the Beatles suggest to picture yourself in a boat on a river, this film imagines being and becoming a river, in images, words, music.
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Overview
This is a fine example of a husband and wife team of amateur filmmakers, in the mid-1960s, demonstrating their creativity in blending together image, music and self-penned poetry: tracing the journey of small mountain streams passing over rocks and gradually evolving into a wide river. The beautifully filmed images are accompanied by a poem narrated from the point of view of the river, describing its ever changing self, which yet retains its identity throughout.
Doug and Norah Brear FACI, members of Wakefield Cine Club, made over 60 films between 1960 and 1985, many shown at film shows across Yorkshire by his friend and fellow filmmaker Roger Spence. It isn’t known which river it is which appears in the film, or who composed the poem, presumably it was written by either Doug or Norah. Nor is it known what might have inspired this work, although its pastoral quality perhaps evokes William Wordsworth and the River Duddon.
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