ShareThe Films Of ... Ray & Charles Eames (part 2)
Machines, Jazz, and The Communications Primer (In full)
Ray-Bernice Alexandra Kaiser Eames
(December 15, 1912 – August 21, 1988) was an American artist, designer, and filmmaker who, together with her husband Charles, is responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20th century. She was born in Sacramento, California to Alexander and Edna Burr Kaiser, and had a brother − Maurice. Having lived in a number of cities during her youth, in 1933 she graduated from Bennett Women's College in Millbrook, New York, and moved to New York, where she studied abstract expressionist painting with Hans Hofmann. She was a founder of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936 and displayed paintings in their first show a year later at Riverside Museum in Manhattan. One of her paintings is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art.
In September 1940, she began studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She met Charles Eames while preparing drawings and models for the Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition and they were married the following year.[5] Settling in Los Angeles, California, Charles and Ray Eames would lead an outstanding career in design and architecture.
In 1943, 1944, and 1947, Ray Eames designed several covers for the landmark magazine, Arts & Architecture .
In the late 1940s, Ray Eames created several textile designs, two of which, Crosspatch and Sea Things, were produced by Schiffer Prints, a company that also produced textiles by Salvador Dalí and Frank Lloyd Wright. Original examples of Ray Eames textiles can be found in many art museum collections. The Ray Eames textiles have been re-issued by Maharam as part of their Textiles of the Twentieth Century collection.
Ray Eames died in Los Angeles in 1988, ten years to the day after Charles.
Recommendations
Masters of Communication: Charles and Ray Eames
The spare beauty and narrative economy of the film work of Charles & Ray Eames should really come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the couple's design work. Their fabric patterns, chairs, buildings...everything they did was approached with an eye for combining simplicity, functionality, and beauty.
Applying those principles to films is a much trickier prospect than one might realize. Just take a look at any Hollywood creation from the last 15 years and you'll see what I'm talking about. In comparison, the Eames films are almost meditative to watch. They unfold slowly and patiently, getting the subject matter across using simple narrations and augmenting it all with a bouncy jazz score. It is impressively easy to drink in and absorb everything they are trying to accomplish and, yes, communicate.
Because for as much as scholars like to point to their 1968 documentary Powers of Ten as being their defining film work, I would much more quickly put the emphasis on A Communications Primer.
Made 15 years earlier than Ten, this tidy 20 minute film focuses on, as Anna Daly in issue 33 of Senses of Cinema so succinctly put it, how "clear communication betters humanity."i
To bring this idea to bear, the two move from a poetic tracking shot of telephone wires shot from below to a schematic created by mathematician Claude Shannonii that spells out in the simplest terms how information is transmitted from the source to the intended recipient. As the film spells out, no matter how complex the machinery and how complicated the actual message, all communication can be broken down to this one straightforward formula.
In fact, it's hard not to watch the next film in this second set of Eames films presented by Network Awesome—a promotional documentary that tracks the creation of one of their most indelible designs, the DAX chair created for Herman Miller iii—without appreciating how clearly they were able to get a very simple message across: you want to buy this chair.
There is no narration, just quick three-to-five second shots of workers molding these gorgeous chairs out of fiberglass, coloring them, and then boxing them up to be shipped to stores. You don't need to actually know any of the processes that they are using to make the chairs to be absolutely engrossed. And by the end, you're almost salivating at the prospect of obtaining and sitting in one.
Another key factor to their discussion of communication is noise, those outside influences and distractions and other elements that distort and confuse messages. In Communications, they use the example of reading a book on a train to point out the variety of influences that could make absorbing information that much harder to do.
I've stuck on that one notion of the communication framework ever since watching the film for the first time. Because, goodness knows, noise is something that we can't seem to avoid in our daily lives anymore.
For example, as I type this, my Twitter feed is getting relayed to me tweet by tweet through a pop-up window that appears in the lower right hand corner of my screen. Behind my Word document is my web browser, featuring an array of distractions from colorful ads on the Thesaurus.com screen (the most visible one being influenced by my Google searches and offering up an array of Eames chairs for sale, natch) to the tab holding my Facebook page that blinks to let me know that my older brother sent me a message.
To see such a minimalist type of film amid the maximalist lifestyle that I tend to lead felt downright revolutionary to my weary mind. And it helped further clarify why documentaries such as Helvetica, Visual Acousticsiv about the architectural photographer Julius Shulman, and Objectified have struck such a chord with viewers. These are all films that almost beg for a return to the clean lines and clear fonts of modernism. Helvetica especially emphasizes just how far flung some designers went—particularly Chris Ashworth the editor and art director of Ray Gun Magazinev—to push against the directness exemplified by the titular font.
So, how does this relate back to Ray and Charles Eames and their film work? Try this little exercise: watch any of the Eames films in today's presentation with the sound off. All of them are just as engaging, but more importantly they are just as informative. The core of their subject matter comes across with amazing clarity.
Strangely, that might the one thing that the Eames films have in common with modern blockbusters. The Hollywood aesthetic has been reduced to the most black & white ideas so that, again, you could watch the latest Michael Bay epic with no audio and still follow the storyline. And that way you wouldn't have to grit your teeth through the insufferable dialogue.
i http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/charles_and_ray_eames/
ii http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Claude_E._Shannon
iii http://eamesgallery.com/cart/detail_prod.php?id=529
iv http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/garden/01film.html
v http://www.chris-ashworth.com/ray-gun-publish/ray-gun-magazine-covers/
The Week that was
From our tumblr
