Death Watch (1980)
Bertrand Tavernier, the great French director, died in 2021 aged 79. This is his slightly mentalist futurist horror - which, despite being far more popular in France, has gained a sort of cult reputation in the decades since.
And as we open to a child skipping around the Glasgow Necropolis, you might see my interest in the film! For it was shot in Glasgow in 1980, and while the outdoor scenes are far too brief, we get to see an intrusion into a snapshot of the city, shortly before it was restored.
This opening shot lifts us over the hill at the Necropolis, for example, and we see framed in the corner, the Royal Infirmary, St Mungo's and then other buildings further into town and into the horizon. The camera so crisp you can make out individual graves, nearly.
A very young looking Harvey Keitel is our male lead, a camera man of the future. His eyes are implanted so that everything he sees is reported back to the news desk and edited. We're shown this as he flirts with a nurse and it is instantly picked up by 5 studio cameras - so anywhere he goes, the voyeur follows. As such, he's the man to be sent when there's a juicy story. And one woman getting ill is certainly the biggest story of the year.
“She’s a good choice, she’s got a good face for (dying on TV).”
I sound facetious. In Future Glasgow, illness has been wiped out, so when a young woman becomes ill, its a sensationalist story. Reverse Children of Men, if you will. (An odd disconnect is that Romy Schneider, who plays Katherine with such heart, looks convincingly frail as an ill person. In real life, a bit too convincingly frail, as the actress was a heavy alcoholic and died less than two years after filming this.)
And Tavernier suggests this Utopian ideal hasn't led to much of a better society. There's protests about rights for the living old, and broken down bits of the city - Glasgow being an expert at providing those at short notice.
We alternate early on between watching Harvey Keitel walking around Glasgow, and seeing what he can see. Our view is slightly crisper than his, though again the SF is mixed in with what the camera eye shows us.
The Provans Lordship is there in Future Glasgow, remaining the oldest building in the city. (Although the full Bruce Report suggested demolishing it to be a by-pass, which was thankfully ignored!) However, we also have the run down tenements that were attached to the Lordship, and apparently still there in 1980! Not for much longer!
This then becomes a game for those of us interested in the history of our surroundings, spotting the ghosts. The wasteland that became a dual carriageway, for example.
So yes, when Katherine finds out she is dying from a disease, the TV Channels set up the Death Watch, a TV show where you can watch someone die in real time. Think of the ratings. This is set up by Keitel’s bored nihilistic boss, Harry Dean Stanton being his usual excellent self in a small role. So we not only have the voyeurism of the viewer through the eyes of our lead, but also a society which will stop at nothing for the sake of entertainment. (Which doesn’t feel that untimely even now.) In one memorable moment, we see Keitel meeting his ex-wife to talk about his “upgrading”, and Stanton in the studio gets excited at the prospect of some live on-air sex – only to be disappointed. Everything is public property, even the private sentimental moments. The TV audience aren’t that removed from the Cennobites, desperately searching for some thrill to add meaning to life.
Incidentally, a side effect of the eye surgery is that Roddy (Harvey K) will go blind if he falls asleep, so he needs to take permanent medication to stay awake.
The cast is filled out excellently – alongside Schneider, Keitel and Stanton, we see William Russell (yes, Ian Chesterton) as the Doctor who misdiagnoses Katharine, Max von Sydow as the estranged husband, and even the late Robbie Coltrane as a driver! Russell is brilliant in a smallish role as a book learned doctor perhaps too excited to diagnose, but worn down by his increased feeling that his role is useless in society. He has a big office, and he waits for patients who never come. The tragic Romy Schneider plays her real horror that the rest of the world is suddenly fascinated with her impending death very astutely. But then dehumanisation is a common strand throughout, from our Network like future (now docu-drama?) to the way the police otherise Roddy and casually sweep in to beat up folk.
“Everything is of interest, but nothing matters…”
Tavernier said he picked Glasgow deliberately because while "Edinburgh is too beautiful, Glasgow is dramatic", as he told the then Lord Provost! And he makes the city as vivid a character for his drama as any Hollywood or French actor. Look at some of those shots, the Necropolis Angel staring down on the brewery and Calton is a particularly fine shot, old, new, doomed and everlasting lingering in the same shot demanding attention. Doomwatch is about the new technology and how it consumes all the old, even the useful. By setting it in Glasgow, and filming in places like The Gorbals, the director was able to link this Aesop directly into the modern planning of the 1980s. The location becomes a living metaphor for the warnings in the film.
But there's one shot I go back to time and again, like reaching forth to an old spectre. Harvey Keitel stares directly at a building which has seen better days, and which is just in the shot but not fully. You can see his eyeline, and we're talking about a 5 second shot here. But he looks at the Christian Institute. A proper Dracula monster house, built in the Gothic revival period of the late Victorian age that M.R. James hated so much, this castle in the middle of the city centre hosted religious charities, and trade unions, and laterally the YMCA and a sales house for second hand clothes from one of the cancer shops. With turrets and a tower, it was unique among Glasgow architecture, but its uniqueness meant the bills to keep it in service were larger than the city fathers were willing to pay. Days after these seconds of footage were shot, the bulldozers arrived.
Just more ghosts of the past, appearing on screen as if alive.
Death Watch is still a warning of the future, of what happens when technology and entertainment surpass ethics or judgement. The message is strong enough to ignore the 1980s technology, surely. Harvey Keitel upgrades beyond his ability to cope as a human being. Society tosses him aside. Tavernier’s anger about society, celebrity fetishism, news tragedy porn is as relevant now as it was in 1980. “We want to interview you three hours a day until you stop making sense” is how one reporter tries to make a sympathetic pitch for covering terminal illness. There are so many layers to Death Watch that I can’t understand why it isn’t a far better received film. Well, I do, it got dubbed into French and the original English copy is rarely repeated.
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