The Doctor's dream

Duration: 23

Year Published: 1978

Creator: K. Jacobs

Format: 16mm

Color: B&W

Sound: sound

Description: Jacobs creates a film about the nature of cinema by re-editing a conventional short narrative film. The original work is a cliched melodrama about the life of a kindly country doctor who saves a sick child with a new vaccine. The film was based on a painting entitled The Doctor exhibited in the Tate Gallery, London. Jacobs subverts the story and breaks down the narrative into a vocabulary of gestures, expressions, props and plot devices. A subliminal subtext emerges revealing the sexual overtones in the relationship between the doctor and his young patient.