Saved from the Titanic

Saved from the Titanic (1912)

A young woman tells her parents and fiance (in flashback) about the recent sinking of the Titanic and her experiences as a passenger during the disaster. Her intended marriage now faces a new hazard because her fiance is a sailor and her parents have just been reminded of the dangers of the sea. Premiering in the United States just 29 days after the event, it is the earliest dramatization about the tragedy.

Date of release
1912-05-13
TMDB
4.8 / 10 (3)
Runtime
10m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Étienne Arnaud

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Fort Lee

Saved from the Titanic is a 1912 American silent short film starring Dorothy Gibson, an American film actress who survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912. Premiering in the United States just 31 days after the event, it was the earliest dramatization of the tragedy.

Production

Only a few days after she returned to New York, Gibson began work on a film based on the disaster. The impetus may have come from Jules Brulatour, an Éclair Film Company producer with whom she was having an affair. According to Billboard magazine he sent "specially chartered tugboats and an extra relay of cameramen" to film the arrival of Carpathia.

The success of the newsreel appears to have convinced Brulatour to capitalize further with a drama based on the sinking. He had a unique advantage – a leading actress who was a survivor and eyewitness to what had happened. Gibson later described her decision to participate as an "opportunity to pay tribute to those who gave their lives on that awful night." Jeffrey Richards suggests that it was more likely that Brulatour persuaded her that the di…

Gibson was plainly still traumatized – a reporter from the Motion Picture News described her as having "the appearance of one whose nerves had been greatly shocked" – and she was said to have burst into tears during filming. To add to the film's air of authenticity, she even wore the same clothes that she was rescued in.

The film's structure aimed to promote its story's authenticity and credibility through the integration of newsreel footage and the presence of a genuine survivor as the "narrator". Audiences had previously seen survivors of disasters only as unspeaking "objects" shown as part of a story told by someone else. Gibson, by contrast, was a survivor given voice as the narrator of what was ostensibly her personal story.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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