The Eameses were the first to humanize the computer for the public at a time when the machine was a complete mystery, and a threatening one. In fact, the couple may have been the tech sector’s original creative consultants. “Young and successful, the Eameses embodied a forward-looking perspective that fit well within the nation’s expanding capitalist economy.” “Charles and Ray Eames were especially well suited partners for America’s progressive industries,” writes the design historian Donald Albrecht. Since their clients trusted them enough to give them complete creative control, the Eameses may have seen their partnership as a distribution method, a way to reach “the most,” but they were also marketing themselves as a brand. The films were often made for internal use, to explain products to sellers, or to promote the benevolence of the brand. Their clients were IBM, Boeing, Polaroid, Westinghouse, ABC, and Herman Miller, Inc. In contrast, the Eameses made branded content. Both filmmakers spent little money on their films and made little to nothing from them. Deren criticized Hollywood and positioned herself in the bohemian art world Anger’s films were banned for obscenity. The Eameses’ contemporaries in avant-garde filmmaking in Southern California were Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger, whose work was concerned with the ambiguous depths of the subconscious, eroticism, and the occult. The editing tends to be airtight-each shot maintains a logical clarity in service of a tidy narrative arc that leaves no opportunity for misinterpretation or discomfort. The couple’s main motto was “to make the best for the most for the least” a designer, they believed, should be “a very good, thoughtful host, all of whose energy goes into trying to anticipate the needs of his guests.” Emphasis on the efficiency of connection is what made their furniture so easy to assemble and durable, but these same qualities open their films to charges of oversimplification and datedness. They spoke through animation or actors, or made cameos themselves. They embraced color film and black-and-white. They used narration and music, thirty-five-millimeter slides, and stop-motion techniques. They held mirrors to the lens to create abstract, psychedelic effects. They’re just attempts to get across an idea.”Īs filmmakers, the Eameses obeyed the design dictum that form follows function: they applied whatever approach would work best for the subject. Charles said himself, “They’re not experimental films, they’re not really films. Short, experimental, nontheatrical, and nonnarrative, they belong more to an avant-garde or independent tradition-and sometimes a commercial one. But the Eameses’ films were unconnected to nearby Hollywood. “Furniture design or a film, for example, is a small piece of architecture one man can handle.” He had worked briefly as a set designer in MGM’s art department in 1941, and his close friend Billy Wilder once hired him as “photographic consultant” for the montage sequences in The Spirit of St. “I’ve chosen to do things which one can attack and better control as an individual,” he said. Lesser known are their toys and exhibitions, and more obscure still are their films, of which they made more than 125 between 19.Ĭharles had grown frustrated by the complications and compromises inherent to large building projects. 8 house in Los Angeles has become an icon of midcentury design, but they’re best known for their furniture: the sofas, chairs, and tables of molded plywood and fiberglass that became fixtures of the sixties home and office. During World War II, they found recognition for the leg splints and aircraft parts they’d designed for the U.S. “There is no predicting what may happen in the life of a sofa,” the narrator said in all seriousness, unaware that he was speaking to a theater of skeptics.Ĭharles was trained as an architect and Ray as a painter. Both are ready to endure spills, support children, and foster intimacy, signaling wholesomeness and modernity at once. But it’s important to understand why the Eameses cast her and how her seductive touch becomes that of the camera’s eye, shifting the focus from woman to sofa and seeming to connect the two. Last month, when Metrograph screened a selection of films by the designers Charles and Ray Eames, the image of a white woman in a starched A-line dress, batting her eyelashes while caressing a S-73 Sofa Compact, hit a ten on the theater’s laugh-o-meter it hadn’t aged well since 1954. From the darkened seats, insurrectionary giggles further distance the audience from the screen, which plays on foolishly. The movie theater is a gauge for datedness.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |