Well, this is it. My choice for the greatest film sequence of all time, and it comes from James Cameron's epic film about the disaster that took place on the RMS Titanic on April 14, 1912. Cameron shows with the most incredible detail why film is the ultimate art form, as it makes us experience, vividly really for the first time, the tragedy of 1523 people on their way to death in the Atlantic Ocean. I select this sequence for so many reasons. The biggest reason I have selected this sequence is because unlike any film before it, this film makes the viewer really truly experience death, because Cameron presents the sinking almost in real time, over about the last hour of the film. The events leading up to the sinking in the film are just as brilliant, telling a fictional love story between Jack Dawson and Rose Dewitt Bukater, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, but it is the first film to be able to really present true tragedy in a visual way unparalleled to any other film. It's a combination of factors I feel -- the fact that the entire ship was rebuilt almost to scale for the film, and they actually sunk that re-created set of the ship. Plus the additional visual effects have advanced to the point where you can't even tell the difference anymore and everything looks real.

Of course after the realization of the truth is known, after the Titanic has struck the iceberg, it is now only a matter of time before she sinks altogether, and we witness the varying acts of heroism, cowardice, and the haunting deaths of these people, and experience the true genuine panic of knowing your death is coming and deciding how to react, and puts us all into the situation forcing us to think about how we would react. From this point on, some of the most truly haunting images are indelibly placed forever in our minds, and unlike other horrific images from films, these remain because they are true -- these actually happened, and Cameron has shown us exactly what it must have been like, and we still wonder -- can you imagine what that must have been like? I will always be haunted with the images of groups of people being crushed by the first falling smokestack, and in the most powerful sequence during the sinking, when the four musicians play their last song, "Nearer My God to Thee." During that music, there are so many images which bring tears instantly. An elderly couple holding each other on the bed while their room fills with water. The ship's architect, Andrews, alone inside the ship awaiting his death with the ship he built. The captain awaiting his death by the captain's wheel as the water fills around him. A third class woman inside the ship preparing for death telling a story to her two children to calm them.

As the Titanic finally sinks, the horror does not end. Images of so many bodies they can't be counted, floating lifeless, dead in the frozen Atlantic. Only one boat returning to wade through the bodies, including a mother holding her child, both frozen, and only finding 6 alive. Also in this final scene, Jack and Rose share one last moment, as Jack prepares for death and tells Rose to go on. She does, living her life for many years, all because Jack had saved her life, in "all the ways a person can be saved." When Cameron decided to tell the love story between Jack and Rose, he brought a personal experience into an incomprehensible tragedy, and it's because of their story that the tragedy of the Titanic hits us even harder. And not to mention Cameron has brought us a brand new Hollywood epic for a new age -- epics must always be revered in Hollywood, because they tell human stories against large canvases, and when done well, are the purest example of what people mean when they refer to the "magic of the movies."

A film of this power and magnitude to make audiences experience the sinking of the Titanic like it really must have happened could not have been made back in the golden age of cinema, and so in a sense, we have come full circle. The cinema was just beginning to emerge as an art form when the real Titanic went down in 1912. And at the end of the century, a bold filmmaker utilized all of the available advances in cinema and paid enormous attention to detail to tell its story to a generation that had before only known about Titanic from history books and documentaries. And this is what makes it the greatest film sequence of all time -- it shows the art form's ability to present real life in a way that makes it indistinguishable from the actual experience. And certainly a long way from an audience member being shocked when they see a grainy black and white image of a cowboy pointing a gun at them and firing. We now have the ability to experience unimaginable realism, unimaginable worlds, and incredible film experiences, as long as filmmakers continue to push the envelope, produce films of meaning and substance and good writing, and dare to dream.