"just six days after the disaster"

Film At this anniversary, The Bioscope delves into the film which was made of Titanic and its sister ships a hundred years ago. It's rather more than you might imagine. The problem is, few people thought it important enough to capture much of its history on film until it sunk:

"The fact that the launch was filmed by a minor film company and paid only meagre attention by the film press shows what comparatively little interest the Titanic had for the media at this point. The Animated Weekly film with these two sequences was first shown in New York on 21 April, just six days after the disaster, so if they were shipped from Belfast then would have had to have been sent out on 16 April, which seems an extraordinarily rapid turnaround. But for some strange reason the laying of the keel and the launch were not included in the British version of the reel issued by Gaumont at the start of May, and are now lost."

In our image saturated culture, it's becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a time when history unfolded outside the gaze of everyone.