When death becomes a marketable commodity, tele- vision will sell death; and so it is with Bertrand Tavernier's darkly colored Deathwatch. Harry Dean Stanton plays Vincent, a smarmy television director who has divined the pulse of his audience. In a world that has banished disease, viewers desire their own mortality. As the unfit subject for a morbid television show, Katherina Mortenhoe (Romy Schneider), a feisty computer novelist, provides the terminal illness. To document her declining health with maximum intimacy, Roddy (Harvey Keitel), an overly ambitious producer, agrees to have miniature cameras placed behind his eyes. He begins a duplicitous romance with Katherina, supplying the show with surreptitiously gathered footage. What is most intriguing about Tavernier's vaguely futuristic thriller is not the utter immorality of television's gaze, but the dislocation of Roddy's personality. Unable to deactivate his "eyes," Roddy is stripped of privacy even as he invades Katherina's. What he sees becomes public property. At first, he is charmed by this supra-experience mediated through videotape. But then his continuous feed of experience precludes any human contact. For Roddy to return to those sentient moments before "Deathwatch," he must cease to see altogether. Steve Seid