This past Valentine’s Day, Claudia Bitrán called up some pals, ordered pizza and cued up one of her favourite romantic movies: James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, Titanic.
Bitrán is an artist from Brooklyn, New York, and she was 10 years old when she first saw Titanic in theatres. She swooned over Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio’s tragic waterlogged romance, and like countless millennials, she swears the experience thrust her into puberty. Nearly 30 years later, she’s still a fan.
“I still cry,” admits Bitrán. “I’m still so impressed by the perfection of James Cameron’s vision: the acting and how well the film aged, especially the role of Rose,” the spirited heroine played by Winslet.
Still, as she re-watched Titanic on V-Day, Bitrán observed the action with a critical eye. As the ‘90s nostalgia washed over her like a North Atlantic wave, she found herself analyzing every frame. And how could she not? For the last 12 years, the artist has been working on a remake of the highest-grossing movie of the 20th century, and her cinematic cover version is finally complete.
Titanic, A Deep Emotion is a solo exhibition and film by Bitrán, and it opened Friday at the Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York, marking the work’s hometown premiere.
The show gathers an extensive collection of ephemera created during the production of Bitrán’s film: miniature models, props, hand-drawn storyboards, backdrops, shotlists, etc., plus eight original oil paintings which re-imagine stills from Titanic.
The centrepiece is, of course, Bitrán’s take on blockbuster, presented in the gallery as a three-channel video installation. Despite clocking in at 80 minutes, a shorter runtime than the first tape of the classic VHS box set, the piece hits every beat of the original script and mirrors the 1997 epic “shot for shot.”
