Near Death

A sprawling 6 hour documentary on the ethical issues that doctors and family members of palliative care patients face when it comes down to the time of pulling the plug, so to say. The daunting length of the movie is a testament to the daunting passage of life to death, in that it you spend so much time connecting with the doctors, patients and family members that the tone of the movie transcends from frightening to strikingly terrifying. While Dying at Grace, which may be my favourite movie of all time, focuses more on the awe of dying, Near Death focuses on the struggle to save and rehabilitate, and this notion does not let up for the entire runtime. Near Death is an exhausting experience, and my heart goes out to the families who volunteered to have their last moments filmed for such an extraordinary film.

Grueling in both subject matter and running time, _Near Death_ nonetheless poses questions that most of us will have to answer, at some point in our lives, for either ourselves or a loved one. Do what extent should measures be taken to preserve a life that might be full of pain and sustained by a machine? Should the goal for terminally ill patients with little hope of recovery be life support, or comfort? At what point do we give up hope of recovery? While expressing ample skepticism about the function of much of our society's expensive, intrusive life-support technology, _Near Death_ also gives us little glimmers of hope - if only regarding the degree to which we can support each other in coming to terms with death, pain, and degeneration. The warmth and patience of one Dr. Taylor in this film is especially heartening, and very istructive in understanding, in human terms, the medical and philosophical issues at play. An unforgettable viewing experience

A very long documentary, but you can't stop watching it even after the 4th hour. the footage was taken in an intensive unit care of a Boston hospital and it is simply about the world in there, a world made of medical doctors and nurses, near to death patients and their desperate relatives. A small world that lives constantly on the verge of a crucial boundary, the one between life and death, a world that is not meant to be inhabited for too long and in which everybody tries to find a self protective routine. The desperate relatives with their cries and tries of find an escape in the medical daily reports leading to an impossible recovery of their beloved ones. The hopeless and impotent patients with their silent pain and their belonging already to another world. The compassionate but always rational doctors that gained a sort of self powering attitude from living between life and death and are in fact just able to endless discussions. Wiseman is able to use these reality cuts and to make a novel out of them, still portraying the reality and in a beautifully 'dirty' black and white. Or better, in grey, this is how death is: and this is what this film is about, death and the poor means that every men and women of every status and education have to deal with it.

I've had some of my favourite people die the last year or two, and spent a fair bit of time skulking in hospitals where dozens of patients all lie in sight of each other, measuring who's the closest to dropping off, sometimes having to remain for several hours in the same room as a dead person with whom they'd previously spoken on many occasions. The curtain isn't even always closed on them and the body remains in plain sight. Jung said something along the lines of the only way to lie comfortably on your deathbed is to constantly make plans for tomorrow as if you will one day rise again. I didn't see much of that going on there. Just sallow faces too scared to look down at their own cancer- consumed legs.

The main focus over these six hours is trying to work out just how far you should go to stave off an inevitable death. If a relative wants, the medical staff will assemble a team of literally dozens of people on call wielding drips, interpreting machines measuring their vital signs, making incisions, shouting out assessments over each other. And very few of the relatives here wanted any of their loved ones to go gentle into that good night. They hold onto an invisible strand of hope as long as possible, and the doctors confer and confer about their own attitudes towards their patients. Continuously expending all this energy on keeping obvious write-offs alive, which would likely result in brain damage even if they did survive, which they won't, clearly gets to some of them, although most of them abide by the Hippocratic Oath to the point that doing everything they can to give dying patients a few extra hours comes automatically to them.

Wiseman's lens is different to that of other directors. It's hard to ascertain exactly how he does it, but he manages to show that behind every pulse in a temple, every slight arching of an eyebrow, timbre of a voice, hand gesture and body stance there's a thought and reasoning and these surface tics are data belying our underlying thought processes. His films are almost raw footage but they still manage to keep you captive because, though we sometimes forget it ourselves, every human has a complex that will never be untangled. Werner Herzog might say Wiseman's verité documentaries only capture "the truth of accountants", but that seems to be downplaying his subjects' ability to tell hundreds of stories in every frame simply by dint of existing. And dying.

This was an excellent breakdown of the complex relationships between hospital staff, patients, and their families and how their mannerisms change around and away from each other. One could call the film a tragedy, but as we gradually realize over the course of its nearly six-hour runtime, the tragedy at the heart of their jobs is just a regular part of everyday work.

I was mildly saddened by the fates and situations of a couple patients shown early on, but like the doctors, I realized the survival rate of the patients was low and adjusted myself to that fact. Thus making every minute of its runtime necessary. One doctor, for instance, explained how her first week was the hardest since none of her patients were pulling through but she quickly realized most of what she can do is simply delay the inevitable and minimize their pain as much as possible, as opposed to save them. Other doctors occasionally vent their frustrations about the patients and joke about their situations behind their back, but a lot of this could very well be a coping mechanism they use to deal with the stress of their jobs. Because whenever the doctors are around the families, they always display an utmost sense of honesty and respect. They need to walk a fine balancing act with being honest about the dire situation at hand and the odds of the patients pulling through, while remaining respectful to the agency of the patient and the family in being the ultimate deciding factor of what medical procedures they're comfortable undergoing, being careful not to offend in the process.

The patients' situations being unpredictable and subject to change at any given moment is on full display throughout but perhaps most achingly exemplified through an elderly female patient who's clearly not all there given her constant uncertainty and variable responses to the doctors' questions on how to proceed. With her mental decline influencing her contradictory responses and constant requests to keep "thinking about it", one can feel each agonizing minute of her time slowly running out. Even with the other patients, the doctors consistently specify that any procedure they do comes with potential consequences and the patient will need to be constantly monitored throughout them every step of the way. The unpredictability of the future makes the present situation of the patients so finite. There's no way for them to go but forward.

Like the other documentaries I've seen from Wiseman so far, he doesn't need to spell out the themes of his work or include any voiceovers/exposition which outline them. The fly on the wall look at his subjects speaks for itself and says all that's needed. That said, I think I prefer Titicut Follies.