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This week, I conclude my 11 part series on the greatest motion picture sequences of all time. I will begin with one of the greatest, a scene from the blockbuster film Titanic, and finish up with a flurry of scenes and sequences which have all been memorable ones in the history of the cinema.
The entire last hour -- the sinking of the ship from TITANIC (1997) --- Well, this is it. My choice for the greatest film sequence of all time, and it comes from James Cameron's epic film about the disaster that took place on the RMS Titanic on April 14, 1912. Cameron shows with the most incredible detail why film is the ultimate art form, as it makes us experience, vividly really for the first time, the tragedy of 1523 people on their way to death in the Atlantic Ocean. I select this sequence for so many reasons. The biggest reason I have selected this sequence is because unlike any film before it, this film makes the viewer really truly experience death, because Cameron presents the sinking almost in real time, over about the last hour of the film. The events leading up to the sinking in the film are just as brilliant, telling a fictional love story between Jack Dawson and Rose Dewitt Bukater, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, but it is the first film to be able to really present true tragedy in a visual way unparalleled to any other film. It's a combination of factors I feel -- the fact that the entire ship was rebuilt almost to scale for the film, and they actually sunk that re-created set of the ship. Plus the additional visual effects have advanced to the point where you can't even tell the difference anymore and everything looks real. Of course after the realization of the truth is known, after the Titanic has struck the iceberg, it is now only a matter of time before she sinks altogether, and we witness the varying acts of heroism, cowardice, and the haunting deaths of these people, and experience the true genuine panic of knowing your death is coming and deciding how to react, and puts us all into the situation forcing us to think about how we would react. From this point on, some of the most truly haunting images are indelibly placed forever in our minds, and unlike other horrific images from films, these remain because they are true -- these actually happened, and Cameron has shown us exactly what it must have been like, and we still wonder -- can you imagine what that must have been like? |
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