Titanic a Deep Emotion: Some Thoughts on the Kiss on the Bow and Modern Painting

Of the multiple readings that emerge from TITANIC: A Deep Emotion, a video created by Claudia Bitran between 2014 and 2015, two have drawn my attention, perhaps mainly because of the overlap with my own interests as an art historian. The first has to do with quoting Manet's Modernism from a lesser-known angle: the unconscious; and the second has to do with the performative dimension and familiarization of gender. Both are present in the artist's video, or rather present by their absence--Manet's painting never physically appears in TITANIC: A Deep Emotion, although it appears constantly through visual cues, that is, a repetition and literalness: Jack's body -- the protagonist, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in James Cameron's movie —changes again and again in Bitran's version between a heterosexual male body, a female homosexual body, a queer body, and a boy's body. Thus, Manet's inconsistent Modernism—as art historian Carol Armstrong astutely observed, and to which I will refer -- and an understanding of the performative nature of gender—a theory generated by the feminist philosopher Judith Butler, who started Queer Studies in the early 1990s—constantly intersect in Bitran's video, as if they cannot exist in isolation either in historical time, or in the temporality of video. In other words, through complex, sarcastic, and clever montages that reproduce Cameron's film, not frame by frame, but rather subjectively, from a starting point of fiction, documentary, and animation, Bitran subtly reminds us about Manet's inconsistency, as well as making us take note of the binary notion of gender, its multiplicity and incongruity. In what follows, I shall refer to Manet's inconsistency to discuss Bitran's video from Armstrong's feminist perspective and Butler's performative dimension of gender, focusing mainly on the references to art history and its conventions, which the artist very lucidly and playfully rescues from the 1997 version of Titanic.