Heritage and Geography

Abstract

One hundred years after the sinking of RMS Titanic, the tragedy continues to captivate the imagination of millions of people around the globe. Since the loss of over 1,500 lives on the ill-fated night of 15 April 1912, when the ship sank on its maiden voyage about 350 miles from the Newfoundland coast, the Titanic’s stories have almost continually been rehearsed through books, films, documentaries and museums. Five weeks after the ship went down, Universal Pictures released the first movie about the tragedy, starring the real-life survivor Dorothy Gibson, whose affair with the film studio’s founder, Jules Brulatour, brought her on the voyage across the Atlantic in the first place. During the Second World War, in 1943, Goebbels commissioned a propaganda film using the sinking of the Titanic as a metaphor for Britain’s ill-judged sense of its superior seafaring skills and its arrogant pursuit of profit at the expense of safety. Its sole purpose was to portray Britain in a negative light, and hence it made no pretence to accuracy. It was the film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 classic book A Night to Remember that set the foundation stone for all future movie representations of the ship’s destiny. Released in 1958, this British film proved a huge commercial success and was followed by several other movie versions, including The Unsinkable Molly Brown, starring Debbie Reynolds in the lead as one of the ship’s best-known first-class survivors, to James Cameron’s 1997 direction of the multiple Academy Award-winning epic Titanic, grossing over $2 billion worldwide.