Dr. Plonk

Doctor Plonk, a scientist and inventor living in 1907, calculates that the world will end in a hundred and one years unless something is done about it. What follows is his effort to get anyone to accept that calculation, and nobody takes him seriously. The film deliberately uses the form of silent cinema: no speech, broad performance, chases run at speed. The account proceeds as a joke, but beneath the joke lies a question about how warnings of catastrophe are received. His prophecy about a hundred years hence falls on the very years in which the film was made. Nigel Martin and Paul Blackwell appear in Rolf de Heer’s eighty five minute Australian film, completed in 2007.