Metadata
WORK ID: YFA 3387 (Master Record)
Title | Year | Date |
WOODMAN'S DREAM | 1983 | 1983-01-01 |
Details
Original Format: Super 8 Colour: Colour Sound: Sound Duration: 7 mins 6 secs Credits: Carvings by Alan Dickinson Music and lyrics by Peter Mogridge Narrating John Marshall Recorded by Peter Byrne Music Oliver Brand Sound Keith Overend Directed by Roy Vickers Mercury Movie Makers |
Summary This is a film of the sculpture Alan Dickinson using wood to make some of his bird sculptures. It is accompanied with lilting music and a narration in verse form. |
Description
This is a film of the sculpture Alan Dickinson using wood to make some of his bird sculptures. It is accompanied with lilting music and a narration in verse form.
The film opens in the woods where a pile of logs has been stacked up. Showing the trees in summer, a blackbird feeds its chicks in a nest. As old trees are shown, and a weasel eats the carcass of another weasel, the commentary remarks on how the new pushes out the old, and that nature gets outside help, as a woodman, Alan...
This is a film of the sculpture Alan Dickinson using wood to make some of his bird sculptures. It is accompanied with lilting music and a narration in verse form.
The film opens in the woods where a pile of logs has been stacked up. Showing the trees in summer, a blackbird feeds its chicks in a nest. As old trees are shown, and a weasel eats the carcass of another weasel, the commentary remarks on how the new pushes out the old, and that nature gets outside help, as a woodman, Alan Dickinson, appears to check the trees and using a chainsaw, fells those with decay. He then cuts them into logs. Alan Dickinson sits on a log and the commentary states that he dreams that, “locked inside the tree lies the secret of humanity”. Then, again using the chainsaw, he makes a sculpture of a stork from one of the logs.
Alan Dickinson is then interviewed as a he stands before some of his carvings at his stall at the Great Yorkshire Show. He gives a demonstration of his carving in front of an audience of adults and children, and the film shows the first prize rosettes he has won at the show. The film closes showing some of his award-winning carvings.
Carvings by Alan Dickinson, music and lyrics by Peter Mogridge
Narrating John Marshall, recorded by Peter Byrne music Oliver Brand
sound Keith Overend , directed by Roy Vickers
Context
When asked about his famous sculpture of David, Michelangelo reputedly said (he probably didn’t), “just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David”. Here tree sculptor Alan Dickinson demonstrates the principle as he carves out a stork from a tree he fells, to win 1st prize at the Yorkshire Show 1983. Leeds amateur filmmaker Roy Vickers, in collaboration with others, wonderfully brings this art to life with original verse and music that evokes a pagan sensibility.
Roy Vickers, on his...
When asked about his famous sculpture of David, Michelangelo reputedly said (he probably didn’t), “just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David”. Here tree sculptor Alan Dickinson demonstrates the principle as he carves out a stork from a tree he fells, to win 1st prize at the Yorkshire Show 1983. Leeds amateur filmmaker Roy Vickers, in collaboration with others, wonderfully brings this art to life with original verse and music that evokes a pagan sensibility.
Roy Vickers, on his own and as a member of Leeds Movie Makers, made a number of excellent documentary films during the 1970s and ‘80s. A few years before he made a film called Plant Magic, also in collaboration with Keith Overend, which has a similar theme of transformative power of nature. This was set in Chevin Forest Park, in the Wharfe Valley, which may be where Roy filmed Alan Dickinson cutting down his tree. Nothing else is known of the others involved in making the film, or of what later happened in the life of the sculptor Alan Dickinson. |