Natural Timber Country (1972)

Director	Ron Finne
Producer	Teknifilm
Contributors
Length	53 minutes
B&W/Color	Color
UO Library Catalog description:	Tells the story of the logging industry in Oregon, with emphasis on older logging techniques.
Call #	FILM MD24
Genre	Documentary
Rare	No
Online	No
Copyright status	Public Domain
Physical condition	Fair
Oregon-related	Yes

Notes:

Natural Timber Country was filmed by Oregon native Ron Finne and is the story of old-time logging in the forests of the Northwest. The film was originally available only by mail order from the director’s home in Springfield.

The film lacks a traditional narrator, instead giving us interviews with loggers taped in the field or their homes. To help us visualize the words of the loggers, Finne edits them together with shots of the Northwestern wilderness, both in Oregon and Washington. Also featured is old footage and photographs of loggers stump-rigging trees, skidding felled logs down greased tracks, and one of the first mechanical improvements in the logging business, a steam powered engine for moving larger timber. Also recalled are stunts and jokes of the loggers, such as standing at the very tip top of a limbed and topped tree, or jumping from one log to another as they rolled down a hill.

Above all, the message of the Natural Timber Country is an environmental one. As one man says at the outset of the film. “Timber all around you, you just never figure you’d use it up.”

We have multiple films in the University of Oregon archives made by Ron Finne, a Eugene/Springfield, OR local.  We own films of his including The Whale (1971) and Tamanawis Illahee Rituals and Acts in a Landscape (1983)