At KIOSK, you can currently see Titanic, a deep emotion (2024), a shot-by-shot adaptation of James Cameron’s blockbuster Titanic, created by Claudia Bitrán. The film, which took ten years to make, is a monumental project within Bitrán’s practice. Known primarily as a painter, Bitrán (1986) has previously explored other media phenomena such as Britney Spears, music videos, road trips, and clips of drunk teenagers. To remake Titanic, Bitrán not only had to learn how to direct, edit, produce, and act in a feature film, but also collaborated with over a thousand participants across the U.S., Chile, and Mexico. For this interview, Bitrán spoke with Pia Louwerens, an artist-researcher and writer interested in fandom as an artistic method.
Pia Louwerens: Can you tell me about your fan-history with James Cameron’s Titanic?
Claudia Bitrán: I loved it since I first saw it. It’s part of my family history. My brother and I are extremely obsessive, to say the least, and as kids we used to get fixated on specific themes. While growing up, we memorized Titanic and all the Disney movies, and we used film quotes as a way to communicate with each other and laugh when no one else was. Titanic lines were our language. I also fixated on Kate Winslet’s body, I felt like her body and mine were the same.
Using Titanic as a model in my artistic practice seemed impossible. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I knew it by heart, and I didn’t know what to do with this thing that affected me so much. I needed to make something really big, something that could convince myself and others that remaking Titanic was important, worth it. Not just a parody.
