film reviews

Review of Eames – the architect and the painter (DVD)

Charles and Ray Eames, in case you didn't know, were the husband and wife team design duo who created the ubiquitous sleek, minimalist chair, now an icon of 20th century American modernism. The Eames were best known for furniture design made accessible by the Miller Furniture Company, but the couple was also famous for their short ground-breaking films, and he for architectural work and her for abstract paintings. Eames: the Architect and the Painter, an arthouse doco about their work and lives, has fun with opening retro design elements and delights in using animation, models, and toys, in the same way the Eames did in their movies.

Although it won a major design award, the Eames chair itself at first defied mass production methods: the then 'revolutionary' material of plywood couldn't be moulded into a single shell, as Charles Eames was determined it would. The machine Eames developed to mould the plywood was put into service in the 1940s making splints for the US army.

Technology quickly caught up and the Eames design aesthetic defined the appearance of the stylish American home of the fifties and sixties, along with more public spaces such as offices, hotels and airports. Working out of their famous studio, 901 (Washington Boulevard) in Los Angeles, the Eames duo became so successful and influential that their designs are still in production today. This doco focuses on their work rand long partnership.. Interviews with designers who worked with them reinforce the sense of the intense creative vision shared by the couple.

The documentary doesn't delve into but nor does it gloss over the less savoury aspects of life chez Eames: he had affairs, and, as is the case for so many women in creative partnerships, her work was undervalued by industry and public perception. Charles Eames was, as several of his contemporaries attest, charismatic, handsome and powerfully attractive to women. Ray was an acclaimed modernist painter and aesthete who would serve bowls of flowers as 'visual deserts' at her dinner parties at their renowned 'Bridge' home at Pacific Palisades. Today she would add 'designer', stylist' and 'creative' to 'painter' on her resume but in the 50s and 60s she was seen as an adjunct to her husband, even being described as on one TV show as a 'delicious dumpling in a doll's dress!' The patronising treatment she is given on the Arlene Francis TV show is alarming to modern ears. Charles, however, seems to have always been at pains to present Ray as his equal in work.” Anything I can do,” he said, “she can do better.”

Another telling sign of the era was the issue of attribution and credit for the designs that came out of 109 – the furniture and homeware was more often than not the result of collaboration but credit was given only to Eames. Fascinating, too, is learning of the informality in business relationships and and the creative freedom Charles Eames enjoyed in his dealings with the big players of the time, firms such as Boeing, Westinghouse and IBM.

This is an accessible and deeply informative film, even if you don't come away from it with an intimate sense of the personalities of its subjects. It does paint a clear picture of life at 901 and of how powerful an impact the duo had on their environment. Immensely interesting in terms of the history of design and of twentieth century life in general.

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