{"id":111771,"date":"2017-06-14T13:14:03","date_gmt":"2017-06-14T17:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=111771"},"modified":"2017-06-14T22:39:58","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T02:39:58","slug":"the-best-for-the-most-for-the-least","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/14\/the-best-for-the-most-for-the-least\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best for the Most for the Least"},"content":{"rendered":"

Though best known for their furniture designs, Charles and Ray\u00a0Eames made more than 125 films\u2014striking attempts \u201cto get across an idea.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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Still from Powers of Ten<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The movie theater is a gauge for datedness. From the darkened seats, insurrectionary giggles further distance the audience from the screen, which plays on foolishly. 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\u2019s laugh-o-meter; it hadn\u2019t aged well since 1954. But it\u2019s important to understand why the Eameses cast her and how her seductive touch becomes that of the camera\u2019s eye, shifting the focus from woman to sofa and seeming to connect the two. Both are ready to endure spills, support children, and foster intimacy, signaling wholesomeness and modernity at once. \u201cThere is no predicting what may happen in the life of a sofa,\u201d the narrator said in all seriousness, unaware that he was speaking to a theater of skeptics.<\/p>\n

Charles was trained as an architect and Ray as a painter. During World War II, they found recognition for the leg splints and aircraft parts they\u2019d designed for the U.S. Navy. Their Case Study No. 8 house in Los Angeles has become an icon of midcentury design, but they\u2019re best known for their furniture: the sofas, chairs, and tables of molded plywood and fiberglass that became fixtures of the sixties home and office. Lesser known are their toys and exhibitions, and more obscure still are their films, of which they made more than 125 between 1950 and 1982.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Charles had grown frustrated by the complications and compromises inherent to large building projects. \u201cI\u2019ve chosen to do things which one can attack and better control as an individual,\u201d he said. \u201cFurniture design or a film, for example, is a small piece of architecture one man can handle.\u201d He had worked briefly as a set designer in MGM\u2019s art department in 1941, and his close friend Billy Wilder once hired him as \u201cphotographic consultant\u201d for the montage sequences in The Spirit of St. Louis. <\/i><\/em>But the Eameses\u2019 films were unconnected to nearby Hollywood. Short, experimental, nontheatrical, and nonnarrative, they belong more to an avant-garde or independent tradition\u2014and sometimes a commercial one. Charles said himself, \u201cThey\u2019re not experimental films, they\u2019re not really films. They\u2019re just attempts to get across an idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

As filmmakers, the Eameses obeyed the design dictum that form follows function: they applied whatever approach would work best for the subject. They held mirrors to the lens to create abstract, psychedelic effects. They used narration and music, thirty-five-millimeter slides, and stop-motion techniques. They sped up footage or slowed it down. They embraced color film and black-and-white. They spoke through animation or actors, or made cameos themselves.<\/p>\n

The couple\u2019s main motto was \u201cto make the best for the most for the least\u201d; a designer, they believed, should be \u201ca very good, thoughtful host, all of whose energy goes into trying to anticipate the needs of his guests.\u201d 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. The editing tends to be airtight\u2014each shot maintains a logical clarity in service of a tidy narrative arc that leaves no opportunity for misinterpretation or discomfort.<\/p>\n

The Eameses\u2019 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. Deren criticized Hollywood and positioned herself in the bohemian art world; Anger\u2019s films were banned for obscenity. Both filmmakers spent little money on their films and made little to nothing from them.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the Eameses made branded content. Their clients were IBM, Boeing, Polaroid, Westinghouse, ABC, and Herman Miller, Inc. The films were often made for internal use, to explain products to sellers, or to promote the benevolence of the brand. 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 \u201cthe most,\u201d but they were also marketing themselves as a brand. \u201cCharles and Ray Eames were especially well suited partners for America\u2019s progressive industries,\u201d writes the design historian Donald Albrecht. \u201cYoung and successful, the Eameses embodied a forward-looking perspective that fit well within the nation\u2019s expanding capitalist economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still from Think<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In fact, the couple may have been the tech sector\u2019s original creative consultants. 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 The Information Machine<\/i><\/em> (1958), they used animation and storybook-like narration to draw a friendly line from the dawn of human toolmaking to the computer. Their most ambitious multimedia work pushed the capacity of the medium and its platform, as when they designed Think<\/i><\/em> for IBM\u2019s Pavilion at the 1964 New York World\u2019s Fair: a spectacular, twenty-two-screen live lecture about problem solving, and America\u2019s first taste of information overload. IBM also distributed what\u2019s become their best-known film, Powers of Ten<\/i><\/em>. Its root, as with most Eames projects, is the human in his everyday life. Viewed from above, a graphic box of one square meter draws itself around a man napping on a picnic blanket. The view then expands exponentially by a power of ten every ten seconds, quickly pulling us from the borders of Chicago into the outer reaches of the observable universe and then plummeting back to the man before inverting into negative powers of ten, ending up at the center of a carbon atom in his hand.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s America appears to be exponentially distant from the Eameses\u2019 when it comes to technology. Charles and Ray could never have expected the Internet, nor Silicon Valley, smartphones, or apps. But just as in Powers of Ten<\/i><\/em>, the link between our time and theirs can be seen as a simple matter of scale: it\u2019s the rate of the change that leaves us dizzied and disoriented. Their philosophy of being \u201ca very good, thoughtful host, all of whose energy goes into trying to anticipate the needs of his guests\u201d has distorted into the ever-expanding \u201clife hacks\u201d promoted by app developers. Need is no longer anticipated, it\u2019s generated by the technology itself.<\/p>\n

The Eameses were lovers of mass production. They always emphasized the process of the many hands and machines that labored together to get their products to the showroom floor. To them, it was the choices and procedures that gave their products value. Today, technology\u2019s role is to erase the process. Apple doesn\u2019t want you to ask where and how and by whom their products are made. Apps offer a designed interface that makes life easier, cutting the corners of procedure and social interaction. The Eames Office was revolutionary in its embrace of invention, experimentation, and collaboration. Today, tech companies offer a similar setting with amenities like Ping-Pong tables and free beer, but no benefits or contracts. This all feeds into the hands of the techno-utopians at the top of each start-up, the ones who call themselves \u201cchange agents\u201d and \u201cdisrupters\u201d but are, at their core, up-by-your-bootstraps capitalists attaching ethics to the very nextness of the next big thing.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One week before the Eames films screened in New York, I was waiting at the gate for a delayed flight to Los Angeles. When I called Priceline about my rental car, the recorded hold message was not music but a man trying to be funny. He told me trivia and corny jokes about travel that fell flat on purpose. Being a captive audience of one, I stared at the strangers huddled around the few chargers available in the airport terminal, tapping aimlessly on their phones. In what branding strategy meeting, I wondered, had they decided to insert whimsical cuteness, cloying character<\/i><\/em>, into this straightforward situation? A person calling Priceline Customer Service has a high likelihood of being in distress. After I hung up I immediately got an email about my call, reminding me to download the Priceline app.<\/p>\n

Between the Eameses\u2019 time and ours, brand loyalty has vanished, and along with it the self-assured fantasies companies used to promise. These days, brands are self-conscious and needy. The idealism and directness of midcentury advertising is the very reason we laughed at the woman enjoying her Eames sofa. Earnestness and sincerity are outdated, uncool, and often offensive. Instead, what\u2019s relevant is cynicism, and the brands that share and validate our neuroses can commiserate, but prove unaccountable and unreliable.<\/p>\n

On my final morning in LA, I visited the Eames Case Study House in the Pacific Palisades. The house is the ultimate monument to Eamesian ideology, though it was never mass-produced. Built in 1949 as part of the Case Study program to make a model of a modern home, it was made of two cubes\u2014one home, one studio\u2014which the Eameses lived and worked in until their deaths. The house, built Erector-set-like with off-the-shelf parts in just a few days, was designed to fit in, not interfere with, the meadow and line of eucalyptus trees on the site. When I went, the meadow was covered in a layer of mulch and the eucalyptus trees were being pruned. A man was on the house\u2019s flat roof, blowing leaves off with a loud whir. The interior has been preserved just as they Eameses left it when they died, except for the fresh cut flowers in the vases.<\/p>\n