CAMERON’S “TITANIC” ON UKRAINIAN SCREENS

After receiving his eleventh Oscar, James Cameron exclaimed, “I’m king of the whole world!” Once his great fellow countryman Thomas Eliot whispered in The Waste Land that the world ended “not with a bang but a whimper.” I would not hazard modeling the soundtrack of the final apocalypse, but this century in the history of cinematography is really ending on the note set by Cameron and his “Titanic”. So much the worse for this century.

Sometime in the mid-20th century Andre Malraux, the French novelist and film director, wrote “A Study on the Psychology of the Cinema,” a brilliant work, ending with “Besides everything else, the cinema means production.” Toward the end of the century world cinematography, like the legendary 1912 ocean liner, seems to have sunk. In Cameron’s picture one will not find aesthetics or psychology the way they were understood by Malraux and the rest of sunken Europe. Instead, there is plenty of what Malraux aesthetically described as production.

The movie is very impressive, an excellent production, as any other state-of-the-art product of modern technological civilization (by comparison, the surviving structures of the Chornobyl nuclear power station are considered by some almost universal standards of suggestive industrial landscape).

“Titanic” also has a self-contained aesthetic structure, costume and interior, but many other movies claiming Oscars also have this aplenty. As for the aesthetic that has guided twentieth century cinematography, Cameron’s blockbuster has precisely the sentimental plot and simple old melodrama of class conflict. True, in this version it is complemented by a very naive “modern” short story about a 100-old-lady (sic) and her emotions, but this is kept in the backdrop, for the main emphasis is on the “production” and special effects making the disaster a memorable spectacle. Another drawback of the scenario is the striking discrepancy between the Victorian attire of first class passengers and their frankly late twentieth century American visage, faces that would seem quite proper in economy class.

Personally, this author was impressed not so much by the brilliant disaster scenes as by the words of one of the heroic officers (perhaps borrowed from the historical record) that the look-out man, who had actually missed the fatal iceberg had no binoculars. It is true that the real-life Titanic turned out to be titanic proof that technical civilization, despite all its might, can be made vulnerable by a small error like a carelessly pressed button.

Only Aleksandr Blok, it seems, along with several other lonely symbolists of European “first class” realized in April 1912 that the European and world “liners” were taking great risks sailing into the new century, and that the death of the Titanic, a global disaster by contemporary standards, was a harbinger of what was to befall mankind. Another great lyric poet, Apollinaire, would shortly say that he lived at a time when the last of the kings were dying. Now at the end of this century we heard a happy champion of mass culture shout “I’m the king of the world!”

The laws of filmmaking production are quite different from those involving machine tools, for every really good screen or stage production must have a message addressed to the hearts and minds of the audience. We see the centenarian lady from the movie on board a real-life ship, Mstislav Keldysh, watching as US teams (among them James Cameron) using the ship’s bathyscaphs are exploring the ocean bottom on the site of the tragedy. It would be interesting to know if the film director realized that this documentary scene would look almost Freudian: searching for a shipwreck using equipment from a ship named for a Soviet scientist who, together with other scientists, obedient servants of a ghoulish regime, worked on what would result in another truly global catastrophe, Chornobyl.

At the start of the Bolshevik dictatorship its outspoken opponent, Leonid Andreyev, warned against what was coming, totalitarianism. He wrote that every responsible creative individual had to see the Titanic’s radio operator as an example: the man, up to his waist in water that was rising inexorably, continued to work the key, transmitting the distress call. A shuddering analogy: a giant ship sinking because the lookout had no binoculars and Power Unit 4 exploding because no one thought to press the red emergency button...

Now everyone can watch the Titanic in his “home theater” in Kyiv, sipping cola and marveling at the special effects. Remarkably, among the many exotic amenities the super-liner could offer at the beginning of the century was a cinema.

“Titanic” foreshadows disaster of which all await rescue