In 1979, the acclaimed French director, Bertrand Tavernier arrived in Glasgow to shoot his latest project - a science fiction film called Death Watch. It was a move away from Tavernier’s best known work - historical drama (Que la fête commence…), crime (The Watchmaker of St. Paul’s), and his scripts which focussed on the complex psychological interactions between characters.

Based on the novel, The Unsleeping Eye by David G Compton, Death Watch centered on a young man, Roddy, who is hired by a TV organization to have a camera implanted in his eye, in order that he may follow and film the last days of a terminally ill woman, Katherine. Tavernier developed this into clever and layered film starring Romy Schneider as Katherine, Harvey Keitel as Roddy, with a supporting cast of Harry Dean Stanton and Max Von Sydow, and early appearances for Robbie Coltrane and Bill Nighy.

For the cast alone should have ensured Death Watch‘s cult status, but it opened to negative reviews, and was quickly damned to obscurity in the growing multiplex world of The Empire Strikes Back, Smokey and the Bandit, Airplane! and Any Which Way You Can.

Tavernier had proven himself to be too clever by half and had made an intelligent and polemical film, which raised issues of the ethics and morality involved in film-making. Tavernier was also presciently examining the affects of Reality TV and Ob Docs, and questioning the role of media intrusion in our lives. Big issues, big subjects, and worth far more than comic book mix parped out by Lucas and co.

Almost entirely filmed in Glasgow, Death Watch captured the city at its most bleak and desolate - its heart ripped-out by unthinking town planners, who wanted to create a container city that mimicked an idealized America of freeways and skyscrapers. Their actions were akin to hacking off the legs of a prize winning racehorse, then entering it in the Grand National. Communities were destroyed, rehoused in high-rise, shoe-box apartments on the outskirts of the city, or scattered further afield in New Towns. The city’s industries were in fatal decline, the docks abandoned, ship-building almost gone. Yet, for all this, there is an inherent beauty to Tavernier’s vision, where Glasgow looks like a martian out-post, while at the same time capturing the mahogany warmth of its mythical Victorian past as the “Second City of the Empire”.
 

 
Previously on dangerous Minds

Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘Death Watch’

 
With thanks to Joseph McKay