Death Watch/La Mort en direct

Before: GT GRANTURISMO Günther & Loredana Selichar, AT 2001, DCP, colour, 5 min

In the near future: medical advances have virtually eliminated natural causes of death, and a television producer wants to use this to create the ultimate ratings hit – ‘Television did not really exist before Death Watch’. A young woman, an ‘author’ of computer-written books, initially sold her death to the broadcaster, but then decided to flee. A journalist with a miniature camera implanted in his eye follows her as a friend and secretly films her dying from a fatal illness. A visionary science fiction thriller about the dangers and temptations of expanded vision, unusually novelistic in its approach by Bertrand Tavernier and photographed in carefully muted tones by Pierre William Glenn: the emphasis is on character depth and complex moral questions. The programme opens with a short media satire with a similar thrust: GT GRANTURISMO shows a car windscreen as a window to the world, on which insects collide at breakneck speed until the road movie becomes action painting. (C.H.)

In the presence of Günther Selichar on 6 November 2025.