In 2014, the artist Claudia Bitrán started remaking James Cameron’s movie Titanic shot by shot. She thought the project would take a year or so; instead it took 12.
The resulting work, Titanic, A Deep Emotion, is the centerpiece of this exhibition, which also includes paintings, storyboards, notes and more. It’s presented not as a single-track film, but as a three-channel video that runs nearly an hour and a half. The format, which mixes narrative and production, foregrounds the dogged creativity of Bitrán’s process and the manic absurdity of her quest.
When Titanic came out, in 1997, it was the most expensive movie ever made. Bitrán, on the other hand, did not have much of a budget. So she painted and animated the boat and built icebergs using cardboard boxes. She recruited friends and family as actors, including a 10-year-old cousin who plays one of the film’s 39 Jacks, the male lead — although many of those Jacks are women.
The artist herself is the only constant: She plays the main character, Rose. There’s dialogue in Spanish, a threesome, a synchronized swimming routine and shots of children playing on a real inflatable Titanic slide that, almost unbelievably, stopped working and began to collapse (no one was hurt).
Titanic, A Deep Emotion is a D.I.Y. labor of love. And while it delights with sincere silliness, it also reveals the possibilities of pop culture. Bitrán doesn’t treat her source material as something canonical — more as a malleable text. Rather than passively consume or imitate it, she insists that we’re all entitled to make it our own.
