AWAKENINGS DOCUMENTARY
This 1974 Yorkshire Television documentary (never released in the United States) features interviews and dramatic footage of Dr. Sacks' original post-encephalitic patients who were awakened by L-dopa in the summer of 1969. The U.S. premiere was held as part of the Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History on July 22, 2000
The following excerpt from Wendy Lesser's article on Dr. Sacks's Awakenings documentary appeared in the New York Times on January 21, 2001.
This past December, in an auditorium at the New York University School of Medicine, Oliver Sacks showed a documentary called "Awakenings," a 40-minute film that had been made for British television in 1973. It focused on some of the "sleeping sickness" patients described in the book of the same name. Though "Awakenings" itself became a bestseller, and was famously made into a movie starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams, the documentary has never been shown on American television.
I was one of the few non-medical people at the event (it had been publicized only within the walls of the N.Y.U. teaching hospital), and while I felt priviledged to be among the 300 or so people who were there, I also felt somewhat dismayed at my privilege. The documentary is shown, on average, two or three times a year to this kind of specialized audience. But this is a film that should be seen by anyone who has ever been interested in Dr. Sacks's remarkable book. It should be seen by doctors, nurses and medical students, but it should also be seen by poets, philosophers, journalists, social workers, legislators and historians. It should be seen by everyone who writes, produces or acts in a hospital show, on television or in the movies. It should be seen by anyone who has a chronically ill friend or relative, or anyone who has to take psychotropic drugs for a medical or biochemical condition, or anyone who has ever been any kind of patient at all.
That it has not been shown on television here, not once in the 28 years since it was made, is very strange. But then, everything about the "Awakenings" tale is very strange....
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