Titanic James Cameron's 1997 Film Titanic Has Essay

Titanic

James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic has an aesthetic approach that is based on the gap between a historical event and our present-day reality. 2012 is the centennial of the sinking of the actual Titanic -- the last survivor of the disaster died three years ago in 2009 -- and has occasioned a re-release in 3D of the fifteen-year-old film. The film is framed by a story that makes the gap in time apparent -- in the frame narrative, a researcher played by Bill Paxton has discovered the location of the sunken ship in the 1990s, and brings up a locked safe containing a sketch of a nude woman wearing a necklace. It turns out that the nude woman in the drawing, Rose (Kate Winslet), is still alive. The elderly Rose (Gloria Stuart) is then summoned to the research vessel in the North Atlantic to tell her story. The long central section consists of this story, although it is framed and interspersed with the sections set in the 1990s. The aesthetic of the film, then, is predicated upon this nostalgia: we watch the past be re-created for us by Rose's character, who will tell her own story.It is also a useful way of keeping the audience interested in a story when the film's title already tells us how the film is going to end: there is not going to be a shock ending where the iceberg is destroyed by space-aliens moments before sinking the ship. Instead, the plot is maintained by the knowledge that the boat will sink, but Rose did not -- the question is not what happens, but how.

Because the film's aesthetic is based on nostalgia, it is interesting to see how this nostalgia is constructed within the film. Kate Winslet's Rose is, according to the screenplay, well ahead of her time -- the film depicts a scene in which she is shown with artworks purchased in Paris, in anticipation of her voyage back to America. These include some of the most avant-garde possible work that would be available for purchase in 1912, including Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon." Why is this included in the film? It is not historically accurate, since this particular painting by Picasso still exists, and was never carried on the Titanic.….....