Vermilion Sands – { feuilleton }

Art on film: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films. This is a minor entry but a worthwhile one if only to draw some attention to an unusual fantasy film by Albert Lewin, an equally unusual director. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman was made in 1951, a British film with an American star (Ava Gardner) and a Spanish setting. Gardner plays Pandora Reynolds, an American nightclub singer living in the coastal town of Esperanza where she’s the centre of attention for the small colony of stuffy middle-class Brits who also live there. Like her mythical namesake, Pandora is a source of endless trouble, only in this case the evils are the result of the romantic chaos she provokes. Her own romantic desires are upset when a mysterious yacht anchors off the coast, its sole occupant being Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason) who we soon learn is the Flying Dutchman of legend, doomed to sail the seas until he can find salvation in the love of a woman who will die for him.

Pandora with one of the many statues that surround the home of Fielding the archaeologist.

Lewin’s film was restored recently after having been out of circulation for many years. I’d been intending to see it again after reading about the restoration which could only be an improvement on the terrible copy that used to turn up late at night on British TV. Further impetus was prompted by a book review for The Spectator in which Michael Moorcock notes similarities between the film and the stories by JG Ballard which were collected as Vermilion Sands. I’ve never seen Ballard mention the film but the Vermilion Sands stories have long been favourites of mine. The film moved to the top of the viewing list.

Esperanza or Vermilion Sands? Hendrik is lured by Pandora’s piano-playing.

The key connection to Ballard is Surrealist (or-pre-Surrealist) painting, a detail of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman that I’d forgotten all about. Albert Lewin only directed six films; he also wrote each one, and was very determined in his attempts to bring a touch of artistic class to Anglophone cinema. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman was his fourth feature after The Moon and Sixpence and The Picture of Dorian Gray—each an adaptation of a novel where painting is an important element of the story—and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, a film that was promoted with a Surrealist painting competition on the theme of the temptation of St Anthony. Max Ernst won the competition, and his picture appears at the end of the film, a colour insert in an otherwise black-and-white feature. Lewin did the same for The Picture of Dorian Gray, another black-and-white film where the portrait paintings (including Ivan Albright’s unforgettably corrupted canvas) are shown in colour inserts.

Continue reading “Art on film: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman”

Picturing Vermilion Sands

First UK edition, 1971. Art by Brian Knight.

Vermilion Sands (1971) is a story collection by JG Ballard which maintains a cult reputation despite being overshadowed by its author’s more popular novels. Most of the stories were written in the 1960s—a couple of them are among Ballard’s earliest works—but where many of his other short stories can read like the work of a writer with bills to pay, the tales of Vermilion Sands are much closer to Ballard’s core interests, filled with symbolic resonance and literary allusion.

Vermilion Sands, the place, is a near-future resort with a desert climate and an unspecified location; a region where the Côte d’Azur meets Southern California but the ocean is a sea of sand. While each story has a different artistic or cultural theme, all are populated by the idle midde-class types found in the rest of Ballard’s work. Ballard more receptive to visual art than many authors, especially the SF writers of his generation for whom art was less interesting than science and technology. There is science and technology in these stories—some of the latter is now inevitably dated—but it doesn’t dominate the proceedings. The stories derive less from scientific speculation than from Ballard’s desire to create a future he would have been happy to inhabit himself, an alternative to the grim dystopias which proliferate in science fiction. The background furnishings also reflect the author’s ideal, owing much to the Surrealist landscapes of Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, a pair of artists whose works are often referenced in Ballard’s fiction. Given all of this you’d expect that cover artists might have risen to the challenge more than they have. What follows is a look at the most notable attempts to depict Vermilion Sands or its population, only a few of which are covers for the book itself.

Continue reading “Picturing Vermilion Sands”

The art of François Schuiten

Paris au XXieme Siecle by Jules Verne (1994).

Following a comment I made last week in the post about the Temples of Future Religions by François Garas I’ve decided it’s time to give some proper attention to one of my favourite comic artists, François Schuiten, a Belgian whose obsession with imaginary architecture resembles the earlier endeavours of Garas and others. Schuiten’s parents were both architects which perhaps explains his predilection. In addition to a large body of comics work, he’s produced designs for film—notably Taxandria by Raoul Servais—Belgian stamps, and a steampunk makeover for the Arts et Métiers station of the Paris Métro. In 1994 he created cover designs and a series of illustrations for the publication of Jules Verne’s rediscovered manuscript, Paris au XXieme Siecle.

Cover for Spirou (2000).

I first encountered Schuiten’s work in a 1980 issue of Heavy Metal magazine which was reprinting translated stories from the French Métal Hurlant along with original work. Schuiten’s story, The Cutter of the Fog, was an erotic and futuristic tale of a small community and the obsession of the local “fog-cutter”. François’s brother Luc wrote the piece and it bears some similarity with JG Ballard’s Vermilion Sands story, The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D. Unusually for Schuiten, the architecture was downplayed in this one although the small homes with their geodesic roofs are like extrapolations of architectural plans from one of the Whole Earth Catalogues.

The next time I saw his work was several years later when artist Bryan Talbot showed me some of the comic albums he’d brought back from a European convention. Among these there were several of the Cités Obscures books that Schuiten had been creating during the Eighties and Nineties with writer Benoît Peeters. These knocked me out with their apparently effortless creation of an imaginary world comprised of several city states, each with their own unique architectural style, and a wealth of retro-future technology, from dirigibles of all shapes and sizes to ornithopters and huge motorised unicycles. One of the many things I liked about European comic artists, and something which made me favour their work over their American counterparts, was the creation of richly detailed imaginary universes with inhabitants one could expect to meet in our world, not facile superheroes or vigilantes. Schuiten went further than his contemporaries by making the architecture meticulously believable and foregrounding its design to an extent that in some of the Cités Obscures stories architecture itself is the subject.

Continue reading “The art of François Schuiten”