More Than a Century Ago Today, the Titanic Sank. Less Than a Month Later, Its Story Was on Screen.

More Than a Century Ago Today, the Titanic Sank. Less Than a Month Later, Its Story Was on Screen.

On this day 104 years ago, in the early hours of April 15, 1912, the Titanic—the most expensive and largest ship in the world at the time, said to be “unsinkable”—set out on its maiden voyage and was lost forever in the cold depths of the Atlantic.

News of the Titanic’s sinking spread around the world

Many people first learned about the Titanic through James Cameron’s 1997 film of the same name, and remember the young Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. There is also a famous speech:

“ We should not think that capitalism has no room for the exchange of ideas. A film called Titanic is about to open. It used to be called A Night to Remember. It cost 2.5 billion to make and has already earned 10 billion. That is venture capital too! The film vividly depicts the relationship between money and love, rich and poor, and how different people behave in the face of disaster. ”

A Night to Remember (1958)

Titanic (1998)

In the more than a hundred years since the Titanic sank, countless films and television programs have told its story. But few people know that the first Titanic film, Saved from the Titanic, opened less than a month after the sinking, on May 14, 1912—and its leading lady, Dorothy Gibson, was a Titanic survivor!

Poster for Saved from the Titanic

The Titanic disaster also took lives from the film industry. Three people aboard were filmmakers hired by studios to shoot footage: William H. Harbeck, who had filmed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; D. W. Martin; and Pathé cameraman Noel Malachard.

The lucky survivor Dorothy Gibson was 23. She was an actress for the American subsidiary of the French Éclair Film Company and was about to become one of the highest-paid actresses in the business.

Dorothy Gibson

Dorothy and her mother had spent two months traveling in Europe before boarding the Titanic to return to the United States. On the night of the disaster, she happened to be playing bridge and had not gone to bed. When the crew ordered an evacuation, she boarded the first lifeboat lowered into the sea. It could hold 68 people, but only 28 got in. Many thought the danger was passing and preferred to remain aboard the “safer” ship rather than drift in a lifeboat on the open sea.

But after the lifeboat had rowed more than a kilometer away, the Titanic began to sink. Dorothy would never forget the screams carried across the water and the trembling of the people beside her in the lifeboat…

At a time when trains and ships were the main forms of transportation, shipwrecks were a common subject for films and newsreels. After the Titanic sank, images that profited from the dead appeared everywhere: footage of the ship setting sail, interviews with survivors, and slides of the ship and its cabins. Warner Bros. even quickly bought a clip filmed aboard the Olympic, another giant liner previously commanded by Titanic Captain Edward John Smith, and screened it in cinemas.

A cinema screens a newsreel featuring Captain Smith

Some footage was fake: it showed other ships, not the Titanic—the Lusitania and the Olympic. The trade magazine The Moving Picture News even sent reporters to cinemas to “debunk” the footage and report every case they found.

The Lusitania, which looked much like the Titanic

The Moving Picture News report exposing fake footage

Public interest in the disaster reached its peak. Within days, Éclair executives could no longer sit still. The company had already made a very successful newsreel of the Titanic setting sail. Now one of its own actresses was a survivor. How could it miss such an opportunity?

Only days after coming ashore from the lifeboat, Dorothy signed a contract to star in Saved from the Titanic. It was said that Éclair producer Jules Brulatour persuaded her; at the time, they were lovers.

Promotional still: Dorothy points to the Titanic’s sinking place on a map

Filming began in New York. Some scenes aboard ship were shot on an empty vessel docked in New York Harbor. Poor Dorothy was still shaken by the disaster and broke down sobbing several times during production.

Film still: Dorothy wears the clothes she wore while escaping the Titanic

Using a fake set to make a “news film” was absurd enough, but the movie also invented a story. Dorothy plays a young woman who has studied abroad and is returning home aboard the Titanic to marry a naval officer named Jack. She survives, but after the disaster her family objects to her marrying a sailor whose life is always at risk. Her mother tells Jack to leave the Navy: he must choose between love and his duty as a soldier. Troubled, Jack returns to the ship and asks the captain for advice. The captain tells him to stay aboard and continue serving with honor. Jack chooses the Navy, which moves Dorothy’s father; he finally agrees to the marriage…

The film’s final scene, in which her father agrees to the marriage

The film was shot in a week and ran only about ten minutes, a standard length for films in the early 1910s. Saved from the Titanic became the first Titanic film—and the first starring someone who had actually been there. It was released in Britain and Germany and was a box-office hit. Some critics called it astonishingly vivid and realistic; others said it was simply profiting from the dead.

The film recreates the bridge game played on the night of the sinking

While making Saved from the Titanic, Dorothy also made another film, which opened in May as well. Emotionally shattered, she could not take any more and left the screen to become a chorus singer. In 1917 she married her producer and lover, but two years later the marriage was declared invalid.

Dorothy moved to Paris to start over. During the Second World War, she became a Nazi spy. In 1944, when she tried to quit, resistance fighters caught her and imprisoned her in Milan, Italy. She and two fellow prisoners escaped and made their way back to Paris, but her freedom after that escape was brief. In 1946, she died of a heart attack at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, aged 56.

Every known copy of Saved from the Titanic was destroyed in a fire at the Éclair studio in 1914. Most of the stills published in newspapers were also lost; the images above are nearly all that remain. The film has become one of the silent era’s most moving and historically significant lost works.

To finish, here is a genuine Titanic documentary—the only footage discovered so far that was shot before the ship sailed. Made by the British Pathé company, it shows the Titanic in its proudest moments, and its last ones.

Watch the rare British Pathé Titanic documentary

References

• “Lost Films: Saved from the Titanic (1912)”
• Stephen Bottomore, The Titanic and Silent Cinema
• Wikipedia entry for Dorothy Gibson

Cinema is a dangerous adventure.