Titanic: Más allá de la tragedia

This documentary looks at the 1912 sinking of the world's newest and largest passenger ship of the time, RMS Titanic. Victor Garber narrates a full-length program that was produced for A & E television. It includes news clips and interviews with authors and researchers.

As of 2015, nearly two dozen films have been made about Titanic, its sinking, the survivors, and attempts to locate the ship, and its discovery on the ocean floor. More films were done around the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's sinking. This film covers some aspects that are little remembered by the 21st century. The scandal of the time was the survival of Joseph Bruce Ismay. He was chairman and managing director of the White Star Line that owned the Titanic. Ismay was one of the 705 people who survived and were rescued from lifeboats. More than 1,500 perished.

Author Daniel Allen Butler explains the scandal of Ismay's survival. "In 1912, the accepted standard of behavior for a man was very simple. He was expected to die rather than save himself and be looked upon as a coward." Following the incident, Ismay was removed from the White Star Line. He was shunned by American business and society and lived the rest of his life in infamy.

This film includes the U.S. Senate hearing into the disaster. It was called by Sen. William Alden Smith on April 19, 1912, and held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. But even with this, the later British inquiry, and several other scientific and historical reviews, many questions about the disaster may never be answered. The ship's discovery verified a teenage survivor witness who made a drawing of the ship as he saw it break in two.

A number of other authors and researchers are in this film. They include Bob Ballard who discovered the wreck undersea in 1985, James Cameron, Ryan Cassidy, and authors Steven Biel, Paul Heyer and Charles Haas.

The sinking of the Titanic was one of those landmark cultural events of the 20th century. It has reverberated throughout our culture, becoming a synonym for incredible size and great tragedy. It arguably reached even greater heights in the late 1990s when James Cameron's epic blockbuster film hit cinema screens. 1998's Beyond Titanic might seem on the surface to be capitalizing on Cameron's film but, instead, it does something far more interesting than regurgitating the facts and theories of the sinking once again.

Surveying eighty-odd years of the disaster in popular culture, the documentary instead offers up a compelling look at just why the diaster has stayed with us. Beginning with how word reached the world of the sinking in 1912, this is the story of how facts and confusion gave birth to the mythology around the Titanic. What's incredible is just how much the disaster reverberated even then, finding its way into the arguments made by and againt suffragettes to appearing in African American folk music. From there, the liner enters the world of cinema just a month of its vanishing beneath the waves. Once there, as the documentary shows, it would find life again and again in numerous movies and TV series across the decades.

Those films and TV series are a big part of why this documentary remains intriguing viewing even after twenty years. Here are clips from across the whole range of Titanic on screen, from the earliest surviving silent films to the Nazi propaganda film made during the Second World War. There are the better-known films from the 1950s like Fox's Titanic and A Night to Remember, the latter remaining among the best Titanic films (if not the best). There are the appearances it's made on the small screen as well from One Step Beyond to The Time Tunnel. And even a few places where the disaster got unlikely namechecks including The Rocky Horror Picture Show and novels like Arthur C Clarke's The Ghost of the Grand Banks or Danielle Steele's No Greater Love. Cameron's film, still playing in cinemas when this was made, gets a fair amount of screentime later on in it, in addition to having Victor Garber (who played Thomas Andrews in the film) narrating the piece. In 94 minutes, it takes in the width and breadth of Titanic on-screen with only one or two notable exceptions such as the 1979 miniseries SOS Titanic.

It also sports a good assortment of talking heads. There are cultural historians Steven Biel and Paul Heyer offering up explorations of the Titanic's appearances in political and popular culture. Historians such as Don Lynch and Charles Haas offer up historical perspectives on the ship itself and how books and movies influenced their own interest in the ship, as does Daniel Allen Butler whose book Unsinkable was very much in vogue at the time. There are perspectives with collectors, artists, actors who've appeared in Titanic related works including Bernard Fox and Tammy Grimes, and even Titanic survivor Melvina Dean. Dean's contributions are interesting as she discusses the effect of films like A Night to Remember and Cameron's Titanic upon her, including the efforts film studio publicists went to try and get her to attend screenings of the latter in the UK. Each of them, and others too help explore the ongoing fascination with the wreck.

Beyond Titanic continues to stand out from the crowded field of Titanic documentaries for just that reason. As Garber says in the opening narration, it seems as though the Titanic has never really gone away. With countless books, songs, and films about the disaster, it isn't hard to see why. For the overview it gives of how Titanic went from a tragedy to a pop culture phenomenon, and everything in-between, it remains well-worth watching even with everything that's come in the last two decades. After all, our fascination with it has yet to diminish.

This a great documentary on Titanic. I recorded it to watch and it very informative. It tells of what actually happened on Titanic and interviews some of the survivors. I still watch it from time to time. It also tells of the discovery of the ship in 1985. Very worth watching.

Beyond Titanic (1998)

*** (out of 4)

This is an interesting documentary that was released a year after the James Cameron film and while it was clearly produced to capture the craze with that film, it still remains fairly good on its own. We start off with a bit of quick history on the events that led up to the sinking from from here on we basically view the sinking in terms of the movies and TV shows that followed the tragedy. SAVED FROM THE TITANIC (1912), NIGHT AND ICE (1912), ATLANTIS (1913), Atlantic (1929), CAVALCADE (1933), TITANIC (1943, 53, 96, 97), A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (1958), THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN (1964), THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972) and RAISE THE TITANIC (1980) are the films that we get to see clips from and we also see clips from the television shows One Step Beyond and The Time Tunnel. We get interviews with authors such as Steven Biel, Paul Heyer, Daniel Allen Butler and Bernard Fox who all comment on the actual films, talk about the errors they might have in facts and they also discuss why just about every generation have been introduced to the story of the sinking ship. We also get to hear about the discovery of the ship in 1985 as well as hear from survivor Millvina Dean who would turn out to be the last person on the ship to die (in 2009). The Dean stuff is without question the most interesting and while there are plenty of documentaries that talk about her story, this one here allows her to talk about watching A NIGHT TO REMEMBER and having to walk out knowing that this was how her father died. She also talks about the various ways James Cameron tried to talk her into seeing his version but she refused. BEYOND TITANIC is a good look at the movies that have been made since the sinking but it's best that people actually search those movies out and view them on their own. All of them, except for the first one SAVED FROM THE TITANIC, are available to view and all of them have their reasons to watch.