With "Near Death", director Frederick Wiseman chronicles the workings of a medical intensive care unit at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital.
As with all of Wiseman's films, "Near Death" is extremely restrained. The film is shot in black and white and there is no narration or music. The film consists of nothing but conversations and detached observations. Patients talk to doctors, doctors converse amongst themselves and occasionally the camera looks away to spy on a sleeping patient. Six hours of such uncomfortable voyeurism is gruelling, but it's worth it in the end.
What's interesting is how our emotions change throughout the film. During the first hour, we're shocked to see how callously the doctors treat their elderly patients. Lives are at stake and yet these doctors seem to have given up all hope. Patients remain on life support, family members stand at their sides, but the doctors have already resigned themselves to defeat.
Seeing the doctors discussing the "certain death" of their patients in private, whilst adopting a facade of "hope" and "trust in God" while in the company of patients, is shocking. These doctors spend more time trying to coax family members up to a point of accepting defeat, than in actively trying to keep their patients alive!
But by the second hour, we grow to understand the doctors. Their patients are, as the title suggests, all near death. These are vegetables. Breathing corpses. The doctor's dilemma is thus whether a patient should be kept uncomfortably alive by machines, or allowed to die peacefully. The answer, from a medical point of view, is to give up. Nothing else can be done. Let them die peacefully.
The challenge then becomes this: How do you get family members to accept death? How do you get family members to give you permission to turn off the life support machines? The first step is communication. Explain the situation to them. But the doctors are so inarticulate, so cumbersome in their dialogue, so thick with their double speak and political correctness, that the pain of poor family members is merely elongated.
The doctors are then forced to put on a little medical show. They systematically remove all possibility of life. They go through each possible "cure", let these cures be seen to "fail", and in doing so, slowly work the family members toward accepting the fact that nothing can be done. It's all very hypocritical, all very frustrating, but what else can you do?
"You've seen us try everything," the doctors essentially say, "but he's still not responding. Perhaps it is better if we let him pass away. After all, he's in pain and he's using up hospital resources."
Family members thus have no choice but to give up hope and accept death. Machines are turned off, patients die and body bags are prepared. How frustrating.
8/10 – Like all of Wiseman's films, "Near Death" is about people interacting with and within an institution. At six hours long, the film is overlong, but it can be watched comfortably within 2 or 3 sittings.
As with all of Wiseman's films, "Near Death" is extremely restrained. The film is shot in black and white and there is no narration or music. The film consists of nothing but conversations and detached observations. Patients talk to doctors, doctors converse amongst themselves and occasionally the camera looks away to spy on a sleeping patient. Six hours of such uncomfortable voyeurism is gruelling, but it's worth it in the end.
What's interesting is how our emotions change throughout the film. During the first hour, we're shocked to see how callously the doctors treat their elderly patients. Lives are at stake and yet these doctors seem to have given up all hope. Patients remain on life support, family members stand at their sides, but the doctors have already resigned themselves to defeat.
Seeing the doctors discussing the "certain death" of their patients in private, whilst adopting a facade of "hope" and "trust in God" while in the company of patients, is shocking. These doctors spend more time trying to coax family members up to a point of accepting defeat, than in actively trying to keep their patients alive!
But by the second hour, we grow to understand the doctors. Their patients are, as the title suggests, all near death. These are vegetables. Breathing corpses. The doctor's dilemma is thus whether a patient should be kept uncomfortably alive by machines, or allowed to die peacefully. The answer, from a medical point of view, is to give up. Nothing else can be done. Let them die peacefully.
The challenge then becomes this: How do you get family members to accept death? How do you get family members to give you permission to turn off the life support machines? The first step is communication. Explain the situation to them. But the doctors are so inarticulate, so cumbersome in their dialogue, so thick with their double speak and political correctness, that the pain of poor family members is merely elongated.
The doctors are then forced to put on a little medical show. They systematically remove all possibility of life. They go through each possible "cure", let these cures be seen to "fail", and in doing so, slowly work the family members toward accepting the fact that nothing can be done. It's all very hypocritical, all very frustrating, but what else can you do?
"You've seen us try everything," the doctors essentially say, "but he's still not responding. Perhaps it is better if we let him pass away. After all, he's in pain and he's using up hospital resources."
Family members thus have no choice but to give up hope and accept death. Machines are turned off, patients die and body bags are prepared. How frustrating.
8/10 – Like all of Wiseman's films, "Near Death" is about people interacting with and within an institution. At six hours long, the film is overlong, but it can be watched comfortably within 2 or 3 sittings.