By Erik Kirschbaum
BERLIN, Feb 18 (Reuters) - The world's first film about the
Titanic, a 30-minute ``silent'' made in Berlin just two months
after the ocean liner sank, has been discovered on the shelf of
a Berlin film collector, a German newspaper said on Wednesday.
Berlin's Tagesspiegel daily said one copy of ``In Nacht und
Eis'' (In Night and Ice), which is believed to be the first of
at least eight feature films on the doomed ship that sank in
1912 on its maiden voyage, had been found after a lengthy
search.
``There were documents and reports about the first Titanic
film but no one could find a copy of it anymore and it was
thought to have been lost forever,'' said Andreas Austilat, a
journalist whose earlier articles on the film by director Mime
Misu prompted the anonymous film collector to come forward.
``The film is no great work of art, but it is historically
significant because it was made so soon after the Titanic
sank,'' Austilat told Reuters after viewing the film with the
76-year-old collector and a Tagesspiegel photographer.
The latest film on the Titanic tragedy, in which 1,523 of
the 2,228 passengers and crew on board died when the supposedly
``unsinkable'' ship went down, is breaking box office records
around the world.
``Titanic,'' a Paramount Pictures film by director James
Cameron, has revenues of $376 million in the United States and
more than $700 million worldwide in its first two months.
Other films on the doomed ship include the 1958 ``Night to
Remember'' by Roy Ward Baker, a 1929 German-British
co-production called ``Atlantic'' by E.A. Dupont and a 1942
German film ``Titanic'' by director Herbert Selpin.
Selpin's Nazi-supported film was stridently anti-British but
was banned by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels shortly
after it was released in 1943 because Germany was by that time
losing the war.
There were also made-for-television films in Britain and the
United States on the Titanic in 1972, 1979 and 1996.
The massive ship sank on a moonless night after hitting an
iceberg in the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912 on its maiden
voyage from Southampton, England to New York. The tragedy became
a symbol of modern arrogance in the face of nature.
``This finding is definitely a minor sensation,'' said
Wolfgang Noa, an amateur film historian who tried unsuccessfully
to find the first Titanic film for a 1992 exhibit at Babelsberg
studio to mark the 80th anniversary of the disaster.
``Everyone thought the film had disappeared without a
trace,'' he added.
The film was made in June 1912 in Misu's 100-square metre
studio at Chausseestrassee 23, a district with a dozen such
small film studios near the Friedrichstrasse train station.
With a cast of about 30 actors, the director used his attic
studio and the courtyard of the building. There were also scenes
shot in the Hamburg harbour. Two still pictures taken from the
screening and published in Tagesspiegel show a boat sinking and
a shirtless man throwing coal into a huge oven.
``Most of the action takes place indoors,'' Austilat said.
``There are some very dramatic moments, such as the captain
dismissing the telegraph operator. But he refuses and continues
sending out distress calls.''
Austilat said the special effects are, as to be expected,
primitive. It is not difficult to see that the toy ship runs
into an ice cube in a small pond. The ocean ``waves'' appear to
be created by someone just off camera stirring the water, he
said.
``But all in all it is quite an achievement for 1912,'' he
said. ``The tumultuous scenes are done very well. He shows the
tensions between the wealthy in the first class and the poor
passengers. He shows the captain going down with the ship.''
^REUTERS@
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