Titanic Censorship?

November 18, 2005 11:02 AM

After the Titanic sank, was removing references to persons or ships tangentially involved common place?

See, I was watching a DVD of an old IMAX film, Titanica and I notice two scenes where the original footage appears to have been censored. The movie makes no mention of the censorings, so I'm wondering if this was common for times, much like the pixelated face is today on cops.

posted by nomisxid to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Best answer: That was newsreel footage of the Olympic, not the Titanic. The newsreel company scratched out the names of the tugs because they wanted to present it as the Titanic.
posted by keswick at 11:40 AM on November 18, 2005

Whoops, didn't see the first link. That was removed for aesthetic links to "balance" the picture and better give a sense of scale.
posted by keswick at 11:41 AM on November 18, 2005

Check out Richard Howell's Myth of The Titanic. You'll find that the first few years after the Titatnic sank really solidified the myth of The Titanic. This doesn't sound like a common practice, but you'll find some interesting info about how this myth came about.
posted by allen.spaulding at 4:54 PM on November 18, 2005

Best answer: I'm baffled, too. Censoring and alteration of photographs for political reasons was common -- but doing it for film was quite an endeavor. I'm assuming those are photographs that were filmed for the movie?

I can't think what the reasoning would be here, though. Wipe out one guy from the construction crew? People didn't sue over that sort of thing, then. Wipe out the names of tugboats? From Portsmouth? Who would ever see them? It's not like they were implicated in the disaster in any way.

The only thing that does make sense is keswick's explanation that this was different footage being passed off as legitimate, and the person (a shipbuilder? architect? captain?) would have been a give-away.
posted by dhartung at 11:51 PM on November 18, 2005