Titanic 1912 (In Nacht und Eis) part 1 of 3 TitanicACentury.com
TITANIC TitanicACentury.com In Nacht und Eis (German: "In Night and Ice"), also called Der Untergang der Titanic ("The Sinking of the Titanic") is a 1912 German film about the sinking of Titanic. The filming began during the summer of 1912 and the film premiered that winter. The film's special effects are primitive by modern standards, but were impressive for that time. In the film, a small toy model ship hits an ice block in a small pond and sinks. The film starts out by the passengers boarding at Southampton. The movie depicts the life of the passengers on board the ill-fated ocean liner. On April 14, during dinner in the Cafe Parisian, the Titanic strikes an iceberg, throwing the passengers in the cafe to the side. Panic strikes the passengers and the crew ready the lifeboats despite the fact that there aren't enough of them. Women and children are loaded while the men are held back. The radio operators,(who take up most of the sinking part of the film) send out an urgent SOS. Fire blows out of the funnels during the sinking and then the boilers explode. The radio room floods and finally the operators and captain jump ship and the Titanic sinks. The film was produced by Continental Film Studios of Berlin, and while most of its footage was shot in studios and in a lot behind the studio building, some footage was shot in Hamburg and some was possibly done aboard the German ocean liner Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, then docked at Hamburg. The Berlin Fire Department provided water to use for the sinking scenes. With a running time of 35 minutes, In Nacht und Eis was three times longer than the average film of 1912. Around 1914, the film was deemed lost forever, like many other silent films of that era. Then, in 1998, a German film collector realized he had it in his private collection (this came not long after the release of the James Cameron film). Various scenes can be seen in the documentary Beyond Titanic.
