Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

During a recent financial transaction, as I handed my VISA card to a sales clerk she took one look at the picture of an old ocean liner with four funnels and said "Oh, wow, that's the Titanic." It was not the famous White Star liner but Cunard's legendary RMS Aquitania (nicknamed "the ship beautiful").


A few days later, I came across the following clip from a 1912 silent film entitled In Nacht Und Eis. Available on YouTube in four segments that run about 35 minutes in total, this film began shooting in Germany barely three months after the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank to the ocean floor. Produced by Continental-Kunstfilm, some of the footage was purportedly shot in Hamburg, where the German liner SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria was docked. According to Wikipedia, the Café Parisien scenes were filmed in the vessel's Winter Garden and the Berlin Fire Department provided the water that was used while filming the sinking scenes.


Those familiar with the sinking of the Titanic will enjoy some hearty laughs over the historical inaccuracies in Mime Misu's film (which used blue tinting for the night scenes and red tinting for the scenes in the ship's engine room). Nor is In Nacht Und Eis the first film to be made about the Titanic -- Étienne Arnaud's 10-minute short entitled Saved From The Titanic was released on May 14, 1912 (just 29 days after the ship sank) and featured actress Dorothy Gibson, who was one of the passengers in the first lifeboat to leave the doomed liner.

In Nacht Und Eis may be the first film in which a luxury liner played a major role on the silver screen (as well as the first time that a miniature was used for scenes involving a large ship). In the ensuing decades, ocean liners and cruise ships were frequent locations for popular films whose plots revolved around shipboard romances and murders at sea.


Movies such as Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round (1934), Dodsworth (1936), Anything Goes (1936 and 1954), Shall We Dance (1937), Now, Voyager (1942), Luxury Liner (1933 and 1948), Dangerous Crossing (1953), The French Line (1954), An Affair to Remember (1957), and A Night to Remember (1958) took audiences on thrilling and often amorous armchair adventures. Films offered plenty of opportunities for farce (the famous stateroom scene from the 1935 Marx Brothers hit, A Night at the Opera), high camp (Eleanor Powell and Gracie Allen's poolside musical number in 1939's Honolulu), and lots of sailors and muscle pudding (Jane Russell's big production number from 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes entitled "Ain't There Anyone Here For Love?").






From the early 1900s to the 1960s, the marketing of luxury travel at sea gave rise to a tremendous amount of what is now known as "liner art." From postcards, posters, and ship models of ocean liners to cutaway views of a ship's hull (or the RMS Queen Mary straddling London's Trafalgar Square), steamship companies did their best to create an aura of glamour and adventure (rather than of hanging over the ship's rail while vomiting due to seasickness).

A Cunard poster showing a cutaway of the RMS Aquitania

A cutaway diagram of the RMS Caronia

A marketing poster promoting the RMS Queen Mary

Midway through the 1950s, two events foreshadowed the end of the North Atlantic passenger traffic that had was dominated by Cunard's RMS Queen Mary, RMS Queen Elizabeth, and the new American superliner, SS United States. First was the tragic collision between the MS Stockholm and the SS Andrea Doria on July 25, 1956, which sent the flagship of the Italian Line to the bottom of the sea. Second was the introduction of regularly scheduled transatlantic jet travel, which cut the crossing time from several days to several hours.

Often described as floating palaces, many of the ocean liners built between World War I and World War II were filled with Art Deco furnishings (the SS Normandie was hailed far and wide for its decor). Launched on March 14, 1926, the SS Ile de France served as a troopship during World War II. Parts of the hit 1949 Broadway musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (which marked Carol Channing's big break) took place aboard the Ile de France.

The beloved liner was nearing the end of its career when its captain responded to an SOS from the sinking Andrea Doria and helped to transport most of the rescued passengers back to New York. Several years later, when the French Line decided to retire the vessel and sell it for scrap, an unusual deal was struck with a film production company that allowed the Ile de France to be used as the setting for 1960's The Last Voyage.




From 1972's The Poseidon Adventure (which used the retired RMS Queen Mary) to 1997's Titanic (during which James Cameron meticulously followed the original designs for the RMS Titanic), audiences have grown increasingly familiar with the architecture and interior decor of some of the 20th century's most famous liners.

• Those cruising aboard contemporary Cunard and Holland America vessels often encounter paintings of historic "ships of the line" mounted in public rooms and on staircases.
• John Maxtone-Graham's book, The Only Way to Cross: The Golden Era of the great Atlantic express liners---from the Mauretania to the France and the Queen Elizabeth 2, offers readers a chance to travel back in time to an era when people crossing the Atlantic Ocean were either immigrants hoping to start a new life in America or aristocrats eager to book passage on "the greyhounds of the seas."
• In recent decades, Bill Miller (known far and wide as Mr. Ocean Liner) has published more than 80 books about passenger travel at sea.
• "Historical portraits" of ships by maritime artists such as Ken Marschall and James A. Flood have done a lot to showcase the beauty of vintage luxury liners.
• YouTube has been a powerful force in allowing "ship geeks" to document the history of ocean travel by using their research, editing, and computer skills to create video libraries that showcase beloved ships, their interior decor, and their place in maritime history. Many of these videos include footage from old newsreels, private films, and documentaries.

With CGI programs now easily available, steamship enthusiasts have taken to creating a new generation of liner art by creating their own videos about favorite ships. A high definition animation of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania (which was torpedoed by a German U-boat at 2:10 p.m. on May 7, 1915 and sank in 18 minutes) is based on historical fact. By contrast, the YouTube channel belonging to "Shipster 1912" features numerous fictional collisions at sea, such as a clip showing the double sinking of the SS Ausonia and SS Rafaello in the Pacific Ocean.




In 2016, the YouTube channel Titanic: Honor And Glory debuted two feature-length animation films that take maritime art and computer simulation to previously unimaginable levels by allowing viewers to experience the sinking of the two most famous White Star liners in real time.

• As most people know, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912. Two hours and 40 minutes later, the ship disappeared beneath the ocean's surface at 2:20 a.m.
• The Titanic's sister ship, HMHS Britannic, hit a naval mine on November 21, 1916 at 8:12 a.m. and sank into the blue waters of the Kea Channel in the Aegean Sea in 55 minutes.

As you watch these exquisite recreations of key events in maritime history, you'll notice that there are no people, no love interests, and no manipulative musical score tugging at a viewer's emotions. It's just the facts -- and some astonishingly impressive visuals that depict a beautiful ship dying an unnecessary death.