The Titanic on Film: Myth versus Truth

The narrative surrounding the Titanic’s voyage, collision, and sinking in April 1912 seems tailor-made for film. With clear categories of gender, class, nationality, and religion, the dominating Titanic myth offers a wealth of motifs ripe for the silver screen-heroism, melodrama, love, despair, pleasure, pain, failure, triumph, memory and eternal guilt. This volume provides a detailed overview of Titanic films from 1912 to the present and analyzes the six major Titanic films, including the 1943 Nazi propaganda production, the 1953 Hollywood film, the 1958 British docudrama A Night to Remember, the 1979 TV production S.O.S. Titanic, the 1996 mini-series Titanic, and James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster. By showing how each film follows and builds on a pattern of fixed scenes, motifs and details defined as the ＂Titanic code,＂ this work yields telling insights into why this specific disaster has maintained such great relevance into the 21st century.

Linda Maria Koldau is a professor of musicology at Aarhus University in Denmark and an affiliated researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She is the author of several books on cultural history, including works on the submarine myth and the myth of the Titanic.