Pandora-Eve-Ava: Albert Lewin's Making of a “Secret

PANDORA-EVE-AVA: ALBERT LEWIN’S MAKING OF A “SECRET GODDESS” Almut-Barbara Renger Introduction The myth of the primordial woman, the artificially fabricated Pandora, first related in the early Greek poetry of Hesiod, has proven extremely influential in the European history of culture, ideas, literature, and art from antiquity to the present day. Not only did the mythical figure itself undergo numerous refunctionalizations, but, in a striking manner, partic- ular elements of the narrative in the Theogony (Theogonia) and in Works and Days (Opera et dies) – for example, the jar, which would later be con- ceived as a box – also took on a life of their own and found their place in ever new cultural contexts. Having been drawn out from the “plot” (in the Aristotelian sense of μῦθος), these elements formed separate strands of reception that at times interfered with each other and at other times diverged. In the twentieth century such myth-elements also developed a distinc- tive dynamic of their own in film. Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) offers a particularly original conception of the Pandora myth by interweaving its elements with the legend of the Flying Dutch- man and plotting it into a story that takes place around 1930.1 It is the story of a young American woman, Pandora Reynolds, “bold and beautiful, desired by every man who met her” – so goes the original trailer of 1951, which opens with some introductory remarks about glamour by Hedda Hopper.2 Lewin’s intermingling of the Pandora myth and the Dutch legend in a love story of the 1950s is in many ways bold and original. The film effects a hybridization of two narratives from different cultural contexts and times. In front of a colorful setting of archaeological ruins and antique finds, Fla- menco dance and Corrida, beach parties and motor racing, it intertwines overbearing material sensuality on the one hand with a seemingly spooky 1 Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, directed by Albert Lewin (England, 1951). 2 Hedda Hopper of Press and Radio Fame Talks about “Glamour”: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Bonus material of the DVD-Edition of Kino Video. © Almut-Barbara Renger, 2013 | doi:10.1163/9789004241923_016 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.Almut-Barbara Renger - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:03:37PM via free access 272 almut-barbara renger extrasensory nature on the other. This is done in such a way that it pro- duces a chimera of apparently natural supernaturalness, which led to var- ied criticism after the release of the film. While Anglophone critics ranked it as pretentious and trashy, the film was celebrated by French critics, who drew a connection to surrealists such as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Lewin himself, a friend of Man Ray, who made two painted portraits and a color photograph of Ava Gardner for the film (only the photograph was used; the portrait seen in the film was made by Ferdinand Bellan), spoke likewise of surrealist influence. However, all this – most of all the question about the surrealist subtext of the film as well as the possibilities and limitations of combining classic narrative film production with the surreal – has already been discussed by Susan Felleman, among others, in her book Botticelli in Hollywood,3 and is therefore not the subject of the following reflections. I shall examine instead the manner in which the motif-providing Pandora myth and the structure-providing Dutch legend are linked in Lewin’s film. I demonstrate how the motivic elements in the myth – for instance, hope, Pandora’s double nature as both evil and good, and her resemblance to Eve – have been fitted into Lewin’s adaptation of the seafarer’s legend and com- bined in an amorous melodrama. In all this I shall consider more closely, apart from Lewin’s film, Hesiod’s Pandora myth and the Dutch legend in Richard Wagner’s opera with special regard to the concepts of gender relation and the images of the woman that underlie these two narratives and how they are portrayed in the film. The Filmmaker’s Fabricated Figure Let us begin with the story of the film. It takes place in 1930 in Esperanza, a fishing village and holiday resort on the Spanish Costa Brava (“wild coast”). The nightclub singer Pandora is the much adored centre of a small group of British and American expatriates; several of the men in this group have 3 Susan Felleman, “How High Was His Brow? Albert Lewin, His Critics and the Prob- lem of Pretension,” Film History 7 (1955) 384–400; and Felleman, Botticelli in Hollywood: The Films of Albert Lewin (New York: Twayne, 1997) esp. 20–24 and 81–99. See also John H. Matthews, “Albert Lewin: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951),” in Surrealism and American Feature Films (Boston: Twayne, 1979) 123–140; Jean-Paul Török, “Eva Prima Pan- dora,” L’Avant-scène du Cinéma 245 (1980) 4–5; Marie-Claude and Pierre-Henry Frangne, “Avez-vous vu ‘Pandora’? Remarques sur le cinéma d’Albert Lewin,” Atala (1999) 95–106; and Raphaëlle Moine, “From Surrealist Cinema to Surrealism in Cinema: Does a Surrealist Genre Exist in Film?” Yale French Studies 109 (2006) 98–114. Almut-Barbara Renger - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:03:37PM via free access albert lewin’s making of a “secret goddess” 273 fallen in love with her with fatal consequences. Reggie Demarest (Marius Goring), exactly a year after getting to know Pandora, kills himself for her sake in front of her while she sings before the assembled audience. After she announces that the measure for love is what men are prepared to sacrifice for it, the motorcar racer Stephen Cameron (Nigel Patrick) plunges his racecar bearing the name “Pandora” over the cliffs (which results in Pando- ra’s promise of marriage). And even the Spanish bull fighter Juan Montalvo (Mario Cabré), who is devoted to Pandora in a passionate and possessive lust, blindly and jealously courts her until he – having attempted to stab the one whom Pandora prefers over him – succumbs to his passion and dies. Thus the seductive young woman incapable of love has a destructive impact on all those who fall in love with her. There is a turning point when a yacht lays anchor at Esperenza. Pan- dora swims towards it naked and finds the owner, Hendrick von der Zee (James Mason), painting a portrait in his cabin that is an exact image of her.4 Upon remarking that this is a surprising coincidence, the Dutchman replies that it is not a coincidence at all: he has painted a woman whom he has never seen before, but he has portrayed her as Pandora. Pandora subsequently falls in love with Hendrick. She answers “yes” to the question he poses to her one evening: whether she would die for him. When asked in return what he would willingly sacrifice for her, he offers her his immortal soul, but disappears soon thereafter in order to spare her from the sacrifice. Pandora then realizes that she is dealing with the Fly- ing Dutchman, who, because he murdered his spouse out of jealousy and blasphemy, was condemned centuries ago to eternal sea-wanderings on his ghost ship until a woman sacrifices herself for him. Realising this, she swims back to the yacht, which is sailing to sea but caught up in a dead calm. Both declare their love for each other, and Pandora once again tells Hendrick that she is prepared to die for him. What actually ensues remains unclear. A storm arises overnight, erupt- ing with a bolt of thunder, and the next morning the yacht has disap- peared. Apparently Pandora’s and Hedrick’s confession of mutual love and their embrace in a moment of suspended ecstasy lead to a union beyond space and time – to a mystical reunion, for it turns out that Pandora is the reincarnation or reappearance of the murdered spouse of the Dutchman. In their union Pandora and Hendrick save each other from the mutually analogous purgatories of a hopelessly dreary existence: from a life without 4 As mentioned above, this portrait is the painting by Ferdinand Bellan. Almut-Barbara Renger - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:03:37PM via free access 274 almut-barbara renger Figure 1 love and from a life without death. In this instance, as is common in art, literature, and music, love and death appear as closely linked with each other. The idea of lovers’ mystical union, of the delimitating experience that merges love and death, is especially familiar from Romanticism and its offshoots, including Richard Wagner’s death eroticism as well as Fin de siècle decadence. This idea in Lewin’s film reaches a graphically expressed climax in a scene that is brought forward – thus making the film’s ending superfluous – showing Pandora’s and Hendrick’s interlocked hands stick- ing out from a fishing net (see Figure 1). Although this “ending” brought forward may be gloomy, it does shed light on the opening scene, which it concludes and to which the film’s actual ending refers back. The picturesque and seemingly documentary opening scene follows the cast and credits and a picture of the Esperanza surf with explanatory, superimposed captions about the place and time of the narrated events. It shows local fishermen in their boats who chat and joke in non-translated Catalan while pulling in their nets; it ends with shock on the faces of the fishermen when they look down upon their catch.

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