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Details from a disaster

From the people who brought you dead bodies, a chilling look inside the Titanic

June 25th, 2008 issue

By Dominika Janigová

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Visitors go through the exhibit bearing the name of a passenger, and learn at the end whether or not they survived.
COURTESY PHOTO
The exhibit is more emotional than technical, featuring many personal belongings.
Titanic


The Artifact Exhibition
When: Daily 10 a.m.-8 p.m., through July 31
Where: Lucerna
Tickets: 220-330 Kč, available at the venue
For more information, check www.rmstitanic.net
For the Post
Permission granted to come aboard,” reads a boarding pass that visitors receive upon entering “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition” at Lucerna. The exhibit was put together by Premier Exhibitions, Inc., the same company that filled Lucerna with dead bodies last summer.
More than 300 artifacts gathered from the wreck are accompanied by comprehensive texts (in both Czech and English) that tell the history of the doomed vessel, recounting its planning, construction and launch in 1912, which ended with its infamous collision with an iceberg on April 14. Reconstructed passenger cabins, background music and sounds, video and audio recordings and carefully arranged artifacts create an effective multimedia presentation.
Upon entering the exhibition, the “passengers” are given an additional boarding pass with the name of a real Titanic passenger. From that point on, you are that person, and at the end you learn whether you survived or not.
Riveted walls, wooden floors, cargo barrels and bags scattered around immediately create a sense that you are actually aboard a ship, with lighting that produces an interesting and sometimes uneasy atmosphere. After passing through a corridor filled with pictures of many of the passengers, you reach the first hall, where you learn about the birth of the ship, its creators, construction and subsequent launch. The dominant exhibit, a cargo hook, draws attention just by its size.
Further along, the exhibits show the class differences on the Titanic, thoroughly explained in text and illustrated by items that differed by class, such as various crockery pieces and floor tiles. Reconstructed first-class and third-class cabins further illustrate the differences, which extended well beyond the cabins: First-class passengers had a swimming pool and a squash court, whereas third-class had only two bathtubs for 700 people.
Next, the sound of engines accompanies text about the hard-working trimmers moving the ship ahead, and a reproduction of an officer’s desk offers a chance to read about the forthcoming disaster. The collision and sinking are told through video animation in a darkened room that simulates the moonlit night of the disaster, supplemented by photos and quotes from the passengers.
But this is not the end, either for the ship or the exhibition. In 1985, the wreck was discovered by a scientific team from the French marine institute IFREMER (Institut francais de recherche pour l’exploitation de la mer) and by Robert Ballard from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the United States. It sits 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) underwater, approximately 400 nautical miles southeast from Newfoundland. The exhibition shows how a firm named RMS Titanic, Inc. gathered and preserved more than 5,500 artifacts from the wreck, using a submersible ship called the Nautile.
Finally, mixed sensations of awe and depression are sealed upon seeing a huge broken window from the officer’s quarters — the ultimate tangible evidence of disaster. Long lists of passengers who did not survive add to the chilling atmosphere.
Ethical questions
Overall, the Titanic exhibit evokes feelings ranging from eagerness to spine-chilling terror. The displays are often educational, yet emotional in offering, for example, short biographies of passengers and some of their personal belongings. The emotional impact is particularly powerful in the room that recounts the sinking, lit only by chilly blue lights and filled with screeching sounds of the iceberg crushing the ship.
But such sensations are at times inhibited by simple carelessness: There are missing pieces of translated text, differences between what appears in Czech and English, and some audio recordings available only in Czech. Simply getting in the exhibition can be confusing, with the ticket booth in another part of Lucerna and admission prices not always clear. The confusion continues throughout parts of the exhibit, with bulletin boards arranged so that it’s easy to start reading the last one first.
Visitors hoping to see technical plans and drawings will be disappointed, and perhaps overwhelmed by the focus on emotions. There is a very small set of plans in the program, which costs an additional 200 Kč.
As with the “Bodies” exhibition last year, there are also troublesome ethical questions. While some regard the Titanic salvage operation as important historical science, others see it as a disgusting form of making profits on dead people.
One critic is Leonard McCann, curator emeritus of the Vancouver Maritime Museum, who told The New York Times, “We consider it graverobbing. We’ve gotten a very strong public reaction against this type of salvage.”
On the other side, Arnie Geller, the president of RMS Titanic, Inc. (and not coincidentally, president of Premier Exhibitions, Inc.), admitted to the Times, “We want to preserve an important part of our history and, in the process, turn a profit.”
Before his death in 2002, Walter Lord, author of A Night to Remember, a best-selling account of the Titanic tragedy, told USA Today, “At some point, so-called grave robbing becomes respectable archaeology. The question is when. It’s usually when the last of the people [who were involved in the incident] have passed on. The controversy is over perception.”
Ultimately, how you regard the exhibition at Lucerna is a matter of personal taste. You will likely be left with an array of mixed feelings, as this reviewer was, and perhaps the feeling that profit was a higher priority than scholarship. Either way, you are guaranteed a powerful experience.
Dominika Janigová can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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