Art Eames the Architect and the Painter Watch Online
Film Review | 'Eames: The Builder and the Painter'
At the Altar of Design, When Cocky-Expression Met Mass Production
- Eames the Architect and the Painter
- Directed by Jason Cohn , Bill Jersey
- Documentary, Biography
- Non Rated
- 1h 25m
All that has been written since the death of Steve Jobs last month is a reminder of how passionate modernistic consumers tin can exist about the things nosotros buy and how fascinated nosotros are past the people who make and sell them. The entreatment of those Apple gadgets — so sleek and logical, so cool and friendly and flattering to whoever picks them upwardly — is obvious plenty, simply the exact nature of Mr. Jobs's contribution has been harder to specify. Was he a visionary innovator or, equally Malcolm Gladwell recently argued in The New Yorker, a tireless "tweaker" of the inventions of others? Was he primarily a designer, an engineer, a computer nerd or an artist? A benevolent guru or the center of a cult of personality?
Similar questions circulate through "Eames: The Architect and the Painter," a lively new documentary by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey. The subjects are Charles and Ray Eames, a married couple (sometimes thought to be brothers because of their names) whose arroyo to product design and the presentation of data was in its mode every bit influential equally Mr. Jobs's. Their name is withal most commonly associated with the chairs sold by the Herman Miller company, only the moving-picture show argues that their feature mix of the applied and the aesthetic has left traces in nearly every aspect of contemporary life.
Charles Eames was trained as an architect. Ray Eames, his second wife, was an artist, and together they ran a design studio in Venice, Calif., that was a hive of inventiveness. Charles arrived at that place in the 1940s from Michigan, and his migration from the industrial Midwest to Southern California was part of a larger cultural and aesthetic shift. The house that he and Ray built in Pacific Palisades, with its simple, indigestible shapes; abundant light; and whimsical ornaments was a domestic temple for a new, less ascetic kind of Modernism, ane that joined a streamlined, functional, practical style with bright colors and pleasing shapes.
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Their motto was "the best for the least for the most" — a characteristically pithy statement of a utopian ideal of backer mass product. The idea that striking design and sound adroitness could be available to everyone has an obvious democratic charm, but it also contains a paradox. The Eameses, who had long-lasting contracts with Westinghouse, I.B.M. and other large corporations, were selling the notion that individualism could non only coexist with commercial standardization, simply that idiosyncratic expression could also flourish within the collective rituals of consumption. The stuff you buy, if it's the right stuff, is part of what makes yous what you are.
Their own eccentricity turned out to exist a great asset. Charles, tall and tousle-haired with a trademark bow tie and a professorial air, was both awkward and charismatic. Ray, with her bangs and sometime-fashioned dresses, is described by i colleague equally "a succulent piffling dumpling." Together they look, in archival footage, captivatingly odd, and they seem to have captured the loyalty of a slap-up many talented immature designers, who expect dorsum fondly, if sometimes incredulously, at the long years spent working at the studio.
This documentary's portrait of the Eameses is inappreciably arcadian. Like Walt Disney — and similar Steve Jobs — Charles Eames did non share credit. His name alone went on the studio's products. And though Ray was his equal partner and indispensable collaborator, the sexism of the age pushed her, at to the lowest degree publicly, into the margins.
The film includes an bloodcurdling, hilarious advent the ii of them fabricated on "Home," in which the chipper hostess takes neat pains to keep Ray in her silent, subordinate place, making Charles the reluctant eye of attention. Later their matrimony was tested past his infidelity, and their partnership was weakened by a loss of mutual creative purpose. After Charles died in 1978, Ray tried to keep their work going until her death 10 years later.
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All of which is to say that they were human being, and the most gratifying affair about "Eames" is that it shows, in marvelous particular, how their work was an extension of themselves and how their distinct personalities melded into a unique and protean force. The film is also accordingly busy and abundant: full of objects, information, stories and people, organized with hectic elegance.
Furniture, housewares, films, exhibitions — at times it is hard to keep track of everything the Eameses were making. But the calibration and diversity of the enterprise likewise establish them every bit precursors of digital culture, which combines technology with handicraft, and layers information and images into what Charles Eames called (meaning it in a skilful style) "information overload."
A conventional documentary cannot quite attain that kind of sublimity, but this one comes close, serving both the fact-gathering imperatives of biography and too the need, peculiarly of import with subjects like these, to convey a sense of the beauty and meaning of what they did.
EAMES: THE ARCHITECT AND THE PAINTER
Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.
Produced and directed past Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey; written by Mr. Cohn; narrated by James Franco; edited past Don Bernier; music past Michael Bacon; released past Commencement Run Features. In Manhattan at the IFC Heart, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. This moving picture is not rated.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/movies/eames-the-architect-and-the-painter-review.html