A Film Canon

A Night To Remember departs from the melodramatic flourishes of previous cinematic depictions of the Titanic disaster, approximating a Mass Observation aesthetic in its designation of character individuation as a limit to be infinitesimally approached, as well as its focus on an ambient, collaborative murmur, both within the ship, and between ships, synonymous with the omnipresent morse code receivers, and the 'code of the sea' for which they stand. Yet the class stratification and antagonism inherent in the very structure of the ship tends to undermine this collaboration; or, rather, collapses the two into a dialectic that becomes unavoidable at the very moment of sinking, in which a false calm, serenity, and even sublimity is built upon a volatile, catastrophic substrate. To this end, Baker suffuses the film with an astonishing, poetic alternation between stillness and chaos, translating the looming appearance of the iceberg into a pervasive pan that ensures that, for the first half at least, the main indice of sinking is a gradual tilt and slide of various domestic accoutrements towards the camera, culminating with the extraordinary moment at which the horde of steerage passengers bursts into a silent first-class dining room, to be greeted by a solitary, rolling trolley. Although various half-hearted efforts are made to contain this antagonism - whether religiously, in the form of the prayer and song that accompany the sinking, or ideologically, in the residual insistence that the ship is a well-oiled city, or even an organism - the result retains a latent socialist impulse, as evinced in the final reassurance that "their sacrifice was not in vain...today we have lifeboats for all".