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...
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